« All which exists can be improved !»

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n the meeting room of an important French dairy milk producer hangs a large poster: ///“All which exists can be improved”///.

This implies also that “nothing we do is perfect; there is no reason to feel satisfied with the existing”. Green ideas are enrichment proposals. They improve, enhance, upgrade, embellish, ameliorate, and polish up the actual system. Thanks to them you are in a continuous process of enhancement.

With green ideas, results are predictable, budgeting and investment planning are light, implementation is painless and should not create troubles. Green ideas are respectful of the habits, the processes, the culture of the established structure, which makes them the organization man’s favorite ideas.

Most of the Total Quality Systems are based on green idea management. They bring an incremental creativity to the organization, where method, standardization and order are prevalent. They’re said to be “the silent ideas”, because they immediately find their space in the real world.

How to sell a green idea? Express its contribution to the lastingness of the existing and the fact that it keeps the common way of doing. Here security is a key advantage. With a green idea, you should not have great discussion or opposition. It’s just an improvement of what is currently done. You bring the system one step further.

An example: in general the 2.1, 2.2., 2.3, etc. versions are green ideas, just upgrades of an original 2.0 version. When a real novelty or a radical change is brought into the 2.4 version, for example, it usually becomes a new 3.0 version.

Green ideas are the silent ideas; they rapidly find their place in the existing system.