Short, opinionated pieces on the craft of ideation — the thinking we use with the people we work with, written down.
Most teams optimize the question they were handed instead of questioning it. The fastest route to a genuinely new idea is to take the brief apart and ask what it quietly assumes — then decide whether those assumptions still hold.
A blank page invites a safe answer. A real edge — a tight timeline, a fixed price, a channel you can't use — forces a sharper one. We look for the constraint worth wrestling with, because that's usually where the interesting idea is hiding.
Grand visions stall because they ask for everything at once. A wedge is the small, almost unfair point of entry that earns the right to the bigger move. Find the thing you can change first that makes the rest easier.
New thinking rarely arrives in a straight line. It shows up when a familiar problem meets a lens it has never been held up to — a different industry, a different customer, a different era. The collision is the method, not the accident.
The point of a good idea isn't the slide — it's the bet you can act on. Before we fall in love with one, we ask what would have to be true and find the cheapest, fastest way to learn whether it is.
Waiting to feel certain is how good ideas die quietly. Conviction is choosing to back a bet that's small enough to survive being wrong and bold enough to matter — and then actually shipping it.
That's exactly the kind of thing we like to start with.
Start a conversation →