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Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 1

All the steps in our method so far have had as their aim the eventual production of a quantity of worthwhile ideas. But the gathering of ideas is not an "end" in itself. The creative process is never completed until the ideas are evaluated, some idea selected as a possible solution, the possibility worked on and developed, and some need filled.

All ideas are not worthwhile. Some of your first, second, or third ideas will probably prove on final analysis to be "old hat." Some ideas you produce will not have substance—they will be hazy, nebulous, or too general in scope. Some will prove to be completely impractical.

In sorting out and evaluating your ideas, it is well to keep in mind the fact that many of them are going to be duds. Not only will this keep you from becoming disappointed when every scheme of yours does not pay off, but it will also aid you in keeping your perspective through the whole evaluation process. And, in spite of the experience all of us get every day in making decisions and in the constant and sometimes instant evaluation and selection of alternatives, most people don't have enough ap­preciation for the potentials of ideas to be able to evaluate them creatively.

Just watching most businessmen in the process of making decisions, you get the feeling that the deciding is still done on the basis of intuition, hunch, emotion, personal bias, or not enough facts to decide otherwise. Often these methods are satisfactory. (You can flip a coin and stand a good chance of being right 50 per cent of the time!) But if you are trying to build disciplined creative habits into your mental workings, it will pay you to build discipline into your decision-making also. And decisions are not easy to make—especially in the selection of ideas.

In making a decision, it is important to be objective, unbiased, and unemotional. And yet your decision may have to take into account other people's emotional reactions to what you decide.

Decisions can become precedents for future decisions. But any decision you make will probably be based, at least in part, on some past decision. Your problem then is to make a decision that will allow for the past, provide for the future, and yet not limit the present!

And, of course, any decision involves risk. You could decide wrong. However, no decision also involves a risk. Your pro­crastination may allow the problem to grow.

When you are trying to decide on the relative merits of an idea, or group of ideas, you need your judgment "full strength."

But there is also plenty of room for imagination in evaluating ideas. Often a seemingly impossible idea may be susceptible to a switch which would make it usable. Therefore, you must not let your judgment take over so completely that it excludes all imagination. Again, it is a case of alternating, or oscillating, to make sure that you will be able to see any hidden, partially hidden, or otherwise obscure possibilities in an idea.

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