Deferring judgement

If creative work has one habit that matters more than the rest, this is it: while options are being generated, evaluation waits. Not forever — judgement gets its own turn, and better material to work on when it comes — but later, and everyone in the room knows it.

Why it matters

Judgement is a tax on contribution. When ideas are evaluated as they arrive, every person runs their next thought past an internal censor first — and the censor is conservative. What the group gets is safe, similar ideas, or silence.

Early ideas are also scaffolding. Many good ideas are only reachable via a mediocre one that someone floated without embarrassment; kill the mediocre idea on arrival and the good one never gets built. And "that won't work" is usually premature in any case — at the generating stage, nobody has tried to make it work yet. That is what the develop stage (PPCO and friends) is for.

How to actually do it

Separate the phases visibly — now we generate, later we choose — and mark the boundary; a shared timer helps. Watch for the polite forms of judgement too: "interesting, but…", the raised eyebrow, the instant feasibility question. They all count. And when evaluation does arrive, make it affirmative — convergence starts from what is promising.

Deferring judgement is one half of a pair. The other is framing problems as questions — the habit that keeps judgement constructive when it is time to judge.