What Good Ideas Become

Rescale

Look closer and you notice that this is Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Or rather, it isn’t. It is a pop art reimagining one of the most recognised images in Western art, scaled to the height of a building and painted across the stairs of a narrow Sicilian alley, placed in the middle of daily life where it was never meant to be. The result is more immediate, more arresting, and arguably more affecting than the original hanging quietly in Oslo.

The artist didn’t start from nothing. They started from something that already worked and asked a different question: what happens if we take this idea and put it somewhere it has never been before?

That instinct - to take a good idea and improve it by changing its context, its scale, or its audience - is one of the most underrated creative acts. It requires a clear eye for what made the original work, the judgement to know what to keep and what to change, and the confidence to present the result without apology.

Most progress works this way. The idea that changes your organisation, your team, or your own thinking is rarely entirely new. It is more often something that worked somewhere else, seen clearly enough to understand why, and adapted carefully enough to work here too.

What good idea have you encountered recently that deserves to be relocated, rescaled, or reimagined for your own context?

David R. Smith