Your campaign has closed. You have 120 submissions, three people to review them, two available hours, and a leadership update in ten days. This guide is for that moment.
The mistake most teams make is evaluating everything carefully before sorting anything. They read each submission in detail, disagree about merits, and three hours later have reviewed 15 ideas without making any decisions. The alternative is triage: a fast first pass that sorts the pile into manageable categories before detailed evaluation begins.
Why triage exists
An idea programme that runs more than two campaigns a year produces more submissions than any team can carefully evaluate. The arithmetic is unforgiving: 30 minutes per idea, 120 ideas, four campaigns a year equals 240 hours of evaluation work. Most organisations cannot fund that.
Triage solves the volume problem without lowering the standard. The 80% of submissions that do not need careful evaluation get a fast, fair, documented decision. The 20% that do get the time they deserve. Contributors get a response inside the cycle rather than three months later.
The three-pile method
Before you read a single submission carefully, agree on three categories and what they mean. Each submission gets sorted into one of them in under 60 seconds. No exceptions, no extended discussion at this stage.
Not now
This idea does not fit the campaign's scope, is obviously not feasible with current resources, or has already been tried. You are not rejecting it permanently, just removing it from active consideration in this cycle. These ideas still deserve a short reply.
Interesting
This idea is worth a second look. It addresses something real or suggests an angle you have not considered. It may need more development, more information, or a conversation before you can assess it properly. These do not advance yet, but they do not die either.
Let's explore
This idea is strong enough to go forward. It addresses the challenge directly, is specific enough to assess, and appears actionable. These go forward to your scoring process.
Target for a pile of 120: spend no more than 30 to 45 seconds per idea in triage. That means 60 to 90 minutes for the whole pile with two reviewers in parallel. The point is decisive sorting, not perfect ranking.
Agree on criteria before you start
The 5 minutes you spend agreeing on criteria will save 3 hours of disagreement during review. Before triage starts, your team needs to answer:
What is in scope for this campaign? If the campaign was about reducing waste on a specific line, an idea about onboarding is out of scope regardless of merit. Out of scope does not mean bad; it means not this cycle.
What is currently excluded? Budget frozen? Headcount limited? Certain systems locked? Say it now so no one argues about a good idea that cannot be implemented inside the constraints you actually have.
What does a minimally acceptable submission look like? If an idea is so vague it cannot be evaluated, does it go to Not Now or back to the contributor for more detail? Decide before you start.
Who has the deciding vote on close calls? One named person. Triage by committee is slow; triage with a decider is fast. Just name them.
Write these down where everyone can see them during the session. The criteria should fit on one screen.
Async triage with multiple reviewers
If your team cannot be in the same room, async triage still works. The key is not to let people sort independently and reconcile later. Use a leader-and-checker pattern.
One person does a first pass and places each submission in one of the three piles with a one-sentence note. A second reviewer reads the assignments and notes, not the original submissions, and flags any they want to move or discuss. Only the flagged ones require a conversation. Everything else stands.
This keeps decision authority clear and produces a paper trail: every idea has a category, a reason, and a reviewer. Be explicit about the SLA: "First pass complete by Wednesday EOD. Checker pass complete by Friday EOD." Without that, async triage drifts indefinitely.
When two reviewers disagree
Disagreements are useful data. If one reviewer places an idea in Let's Explore and another in Not Now, the tension usually means one of three things: the idea is genuinely ambiguous, the reviewers have different understandings of scope, or one reviewer has context the other lacks.
A quick verbal check is enough. If you cannot resolve it in 2 minutes, it goes to Interesting and gets a second look during formal evaluation. The Interesting bucket is the deliberate buffer that prevents disagreement from grinding the process to a halt. If more than 10% of ideas need a tie-break, your criteria were not specific enough.
Three cognitive traps
Familiarity bias
We judge ideas we recognise as safer. An idea resembling something you have seen work will be sorted higher than an unfamiliar approach that may be more effective. Ask: "Am I sorting this higher because it is good, or because it is familiar?"
Seniority hierarchy
We favour ideas from senior people because their writing often signals competence regardless of content. Read the idea, not the contributor: cover the name field if you have to.
Complexity penalty
Ideas hard to explain are often dismissed as impractical, even when the difficulty is in the articulation. Frontline contributors often have the best ideas and the worst writing. Default these to Interesting with a clarification request.
What you have after triage
When triage is done, expect roughly these proportions on a 120-submission campaign:
- Let's Explore: 10 to 20 ideas. These go into formal scoring. More than 20 means triage was not strict enough; fewer than 5 means the campaign was too narrow.
- Interesting: 20 to 40 ideas. These get a clarification request or hold-for-next-cycle decision.
- Not Now: 60 to 90 ideas. These get a respectful, specific reply explaining why.
From Let's Explore, expect roughly 3 to 7 ideas to actually be implemented. The point of running 120 submissions is to find the 5 that matter and give every contributor a fair, fast answer.
When two hours is not enough
Pre-filter pass. A single reviewer does a 60-second-per-idea sweep, sorting only into "obviously not for this cycle" and "everything else." Aim to remove 30-50% of the pile before real triage starts.
Spread the work. Triage 30 to 40 ideas per session at the same time of day. Three sessions of 30 ideas at 30 minutes each beats one marathon of 90 minutes. Decision quality decays sharply after 45 minutes of continuous triage.
Both approaches are better than skipping triage. The temptation under time pressure is to "just evaluate the obvious ones." That always produces worse outcomes: contributors do not hear back, marginal ideas pile up, and the next campaign launches against a backlog.
Communicating outcomes to contributors
The biggest predictor of whether your next campaign gets more submissions is whether the current contributors heard back. Outcomes need to be communicated quickly and specifically.
For Not Now ideas
"Thanks for submitting [idea title]. We reviewed it for [campaign name] on [date]. It is not advancing in this cycle because [specific reason]. The idea will stay in our backlog and we will revisit it if conditions change."
The specificity matters. "Not aligned with strategy" tells the contributor nothing. "Requires capex we do not have this quarter" tells them exactly what would change the answer.
For Interesting ideas
"Thanks for submitting [idea title]. We see real potential and want to explore it further. To assess it properly we need to understand [specific question]. Would you add [specific information] to your submission, or would a 15-minute call help? We will get back to you by [date]."
For Let's Explore ideas
"Thanks for submitting [idea title]. It has been selected for detailed evaluation. Here is what happens next: [evaluation team] will assess it on [criteria] by [date]. You will hear back with a decision by [date]."
For more on this, see giving feedback that builds trust.
Triage as a recurring workflow
If you run campaigns more than twice a year, triage becomes a routine. Routinising it lowers cognitive load, makes decisions more consistent, and produces trend data on what your organisation surfaces.
Write a one-page triage card and reuse it. It should contain the three categories, the campaign-specific scope statement, the named decider, and the SLA. Update the scope per campaign; leave everything else fixed.
After three campaigns you start to see patterns: a department that consistently produces strong submissions, a recurring theme, a category that always lands in Not Now because it requires capex you never have. The third is most actionable: either contributors do not know about the constraint, or the constraint deserves a strategic conversation.
A worked example: 120 ideas in 90 minutes
Setup (10 minutes): two reviewers and a campaign owner read the criteria together and confirm the named decider.
First pass (60 minutes): reviewers split the pile and work in parallel. Each idea gets a category and a one-sentence note in under 45 seconds. They flag second-opinion ideas but do not stop to debate.
Reconciliation (15 minutes): they swap halves. The second reviewer reads assignments and notes, not original ideas. About 8 get flagged. The campaign owner resolves them, defaulting to Interesting on anything over two minutes.
Outcome (5 minutes): totals and action list. 14 in Let's Explore, 32 in Interesting, 74 in Not Now. Total elapsed: 90 minutes. Total people-hours: 4.5. All 120 contributors get a response inside the same week.
Frequently asked questions
Should you triage before or after anonymising?
Triage as-is first, then anonymise for deeper evaluation if bias is a risk. Speed matters more than bias prevention in triage; anonymisation matters more in formal evaluation, where you are making funded/not-funded decisions.
What if an idea is so poorly written you cannot understand it?
If it is in scope and addresses something real, put it in Interesting with a note: "Good underlying problem, but submission needs clarification." Reach out to the contributor. Assume good faith and prioritise intention over rough writing.
How do you handle ideas that are similar but different?
Group them during triage with a note. During formal evaluation, either merge them if they are duplicates or evaluate separately if distinctions matter. Triage flags the relationship; merging happens in evaluation.
Can you triage in batches across multiple days?
Yes. 30 to 40 ideas per session, same time each day. Spread over three days (30-30-60), you maintain consistent decision quality. Keep the same reviewer team and criteria across sessions.
Should AI do the triage for us?
AI can help but should not decide. Useful: clustering similar submissions, flagging duplicates, surfacing themes. Letting AI auto-place ideas into Not Now backfires: contributors lose trust, and you lose the contextual judgement that makes triage useful. Under GDPR, fully automated decisions are also restricted.
Can we triage more than 100 ideas in two hours?
Two hours with two reviewers handles 100-150 comfortably. Above that, use a pre-filter or split across sessions. Trying to triage 250 ideas in two hours produces decisions you will regret.
Should we use a scoring tool for triage?
No. Triage is fast and categorical. Save scoring for the smaller pile that comes out of triage.
Related guides
- The idea scoring scorecard: 3 models for different situations
- How to prioritise ideas when everything feels important
- How to give feedback that builds trust
- Who should you invite? The audience planning worksheet
- How to write an idea challenge that gets relevant ideas
- Your first idea challenge: from question to decision in 10 days
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