Every idea has a normal. Most teams never look along it.

Watch a team work on an idea for a week and you will see them move in a predictable set of directions. They make it bigger. They make it cheaper. They make it faster to ship. They argue about which of those to do first.

Every one of those moves happens on the surface of the idea. They change its position without changing what it is.

The direction nobody faces

At any point on a surface there is exactly one direction that points straight out of it: the normal. For an idea, the normal is the question that is perpendicular to every option currently on the table.

If the team is debating price, size, and speed, the normal might be: who is this for, if it is not for the people we have been designing for? If the team is debating which market to enter first, the normal might be: what would we build if we could not enter any of them?

These questions are uncomfortable because they do not advance any of the options. They do something better. They tell you whether the surface you are standing on is the right one.

How to find it

Write down every option your team is currently considering. Then write down the one assumption all of them share. The normal is almost always the question that removes that assumption.

A caution

The normal is a direction, not a destination. Most teams who look along it decide to stay where they were, and they stay with more conviction than before. That is a perfectly good outcome.

Occasionally an idea's normal points somewhere no one in the room can describe. We have learned to write those down and come back to them in the morning, when the angle is usually easier to read.