This week, our task was to reduce our list of 80+ ideas into a more manageable 12. The idea was that this list would consist of our top 3 ideas from each of the 4 belief change strategies (Reflection, Cognitive Dissonance, Identification with a Character, and Metaphor). To do this, we began by each of us individually going through the list of 80, and picking our 3 favorites. We also identified anywhere from 1-3 additional ideas, to ensure that we picked at one idea from each of the 4 strategies.
After this, we met up to discuss the ideas we liked. At first, we got into in-depth discussions of each idea as they were proposed, but when we realized we had over 20 nominations to discuss we shortened it to briefly explaining why you liked a particular idea. After each idea was introduced, we then went strategy by strategy, and each voted on our 3 favorites. After that, we just tallied up the votes and the top 3 in each strategy made it to our final list.
For the most part, this strategy worked fairly well; we managed to reduce our list from 84 to 12 in a couple hours. However, there was some concern at the end that perhaps this process missed out some ideas that everyone liked, but no one person was passionate about. Since we were only nominating our 3 favorite ideas, it’s possible that, for example, everyone’s 4th favorite idea was the same, but it didn’t even get discussed because it didn’t make the cut. An idea like that would potentially be more useful than, say, an idea that was one person’s favorite, but everyone else’s least favorite.
Because of this, it will be important to be open to ideas that may not have made the list of 12 as we work to narrow our ideas down to 3 final pitches. Our final pitches will need to be fairly concrete, and many of our current ideas are incomplete — perhaps a mechanic without a story, or a story without a mechanic. While it would be easy to simply vote on our 3 favorites from this list of 12, at this stage we will likely need to combine parts of several different ideas together to come up with complete, interesting ideas that we feel confident in presenting at Quarters. As a result, this next round of narrowing down will have to be more holistic than the last.