A lot of time is spent on messaging sessions to discover winning ideas.
It is a good way to start to illicit public policy and policy ideas that will help you win.
But, it is just the start of a process that will lead to the progressive incremental elimination of the first tranche of ideas you come up with.
Visual – As a Kanban Board it would look like this:
5 Stages
There are five stages in all.
Stage 1 – Good Ideas
List the best ideas you have to address the issue at hand. This is helpful in addressing an upcoming public consultation on a new legislative proposal.
Some of the ideas you come up with are strong. I call them Trump Cards, based on the card game. These are the ideas that, if you put them forward, appear to be objectively very persuasive. These are the ideas that it is hard to find any reasonable person would reject.
At this stage, you’ll ditch the wacko and fetish community ideas that are better not discussed in public.
Stage 2 – Good Ideas With Evidence
For each of the good ideas that sound plausible to your experts, you then go away and find the evidence to support each of those ideas.
The evidence has to be real and credible evidence.
If the idea is a matter of belief, but there is no credible evidence to support your belief, you can take it forward, but realise that the chances that people other than yourselves or true believers in what you believe will take it up are limited. This is like citing passages from the Catechism to a group of agnostics and atheists.
Early on, you’ll find that the evidence you thought was out there to support your ideas does not exist, or you can’t find it.
In that case, it makes sense to eliminate those ideas from the mix.
Stage 3 – Good Ideas + Evidence + Solution
After this, you use the remaining ideas with credible evidence to provide a viable solution.Your idea needs to provide a realistic option/solution that can be taken forward.
If it does not remove it from the mix.
Stage 4 – Good Ideas + Evidence + Solution + Clear
The remaining ideas in the mix must make sense to your audience of policymakers and politicians. An idea that is too complex that only an ancient priesthood of experts can understand it will not pass.
Stage 5 – Good Ideas + Evidence + Solution + Clear + Politically Viable
The remaining ideas have to be politically viable. They must have support from the Commission, the EP and the Member States. You need to have the votes for them.
Good ideas, with evidence that show they provide a workable, real-world solution, that is clear to non-experts will be eliminated if they are deemed politically unviable.
The Case for Progressive Incremental Reduction
As a general rule, I find around 10- 20% of the initial good ideas land up getting used at the end.
The point of putting forward your best ideas that have good evidence, offer viable solutions and are clear and politically viable is that these are the only ones that can be taken up.
You can put forward many ideas you believe in, but know that your heart of hearts won’t get taken up. If you table your initial list, you will likely drown out the few good ideas that reach stage 5.
This rate of attrition mirrors the 80/20 principle.