Your campaign closed. You have 120 submissions. You have three people to review them, two hours available this week, and a leadership update in ten days. This guide is for exactly this moment.
The mistake most teams make at this stage is trying to evaluate everything carefully before sorting anything. They read each submission in detail, disagree about its merits, and three hours later have reviewed 15 ideas with no decisions made. The alternative is triage: a fast first pass that separates the pile into workable categories before any detailed evaluation begins.
The Three-Pile Method
Before you read a single submission carefully, agree on three buckets and what they mean. Every submission gets sorted into one of them in under 60 seconds. No exceptions, no extended discussion at this stage.
Not for now
This idea does not fit the scope of this campaign, is clearly not feasible with current resources, or has already been tried and failed. You are not rejecting it forever. You are removing it from active consideration in this cycle. These ideas still deserve a brief response to their submitter.
Interesting
This idea is worth a second look. It addresses something real, or suggests an angle you have not considered. It might need more development, more information, or a conversation with the right person before you can properly assess it. These do not move forward yet, but they do not die either.
Let us explore
This idea is strong enough to move to proper evaluation. It addresses the challenge directly, is specific enough to assess, and seems actionable. These move into your scoring process.
Your goal for a 120-submission pile: 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 working in parallel.
Agree on Criteria Before You Start
The 5 minutes you spend aligning criteria before you start will save you 3 hours of disagreement during the review. Before triage begins, your review team needs to answer these questions out loud and agree:
What is in scope for this campaign? (If the campaign was about reducing material waste on Line 2, an idea about improving the onboarding process is out of scope regardless of its merit.)
What is currently off the table? (Budget frozen? Headcount restricted? Certain systems locked? Say it now so nobody argues about a great idea that simply cannot happen.)
What does a minimum viable submission look like? (If an idea is so vague it cannot be evaluated, does it go to Not for now, or do you send it back to the submitter for more detail? Agree before you start.)
Write these down somewhere everyone can see during the review session.
How to Do Async Triage With Multiple Reviewers
If your team cannot be in the same room at the same time, async triage still works. The key is to not have people sort independently and then try to reconcile. Instead:
One person does a first pass and puts every submission into one of the three piles with a one-sentence note explaining why. A second reviewer reads the pile assignments and the notes, not the original submissions, and flags any they want to move or discuss. Only the flagged ones require a conversation. Everything else stands as sorted by the first reviewer.
This keeps decision authority clear and reduces the back-and-forth that kills async workflows.
What to Do When Two Reviewers Score an Idea Very Differently
Disagreements are useful data. If one reviewer puts an idea in Let us explore and another puts it in Not for now, that tension usually means one of three things: the idea is genuinely ambiguous and needs a third opinion, the two reviewers have different understandings of the campaign scope, or one reviewer has context the other does not.
In triage, a quick verbal check is enough. If you cannot resolve it in 2 minutes, it goes to Interesting for now and gets a second look during formal evaluation. Triage is not the place for extended debate.
Three Cognitive Traps in Idea Evaluation
Familiarity bias: We tend to rate ideas we recognize as safer or better. An idea that looks like something you have seen work before will score higher than an unfamiliar approach that might be more effective. Watch for this especially when reviewing ideas from departments you know well.
Solution seniority: We tend to favor ideas from people in senior roles, even when reviewing blind. If your review process is not anonymous at the triage stage, acknowledge this bias explicitly and compensate for it.
Complexity penalty: Ideas that are hard to explain are often dismissed as impractical, when they are actually just not yet well articulated. When an idea is confusing, ask whether it is confusing because the idea is bad or because the submitter did not have time to write it clearly. If you suspect the latter, send it to Interesting rather than Not for now.
After Triage: What You Have
When triage is done, you should have a small pile in Let us explore (10 to 20 ideas from a 120-submission campaign is a reasonable target), a medium pile in Interesting, and everything else in Not for now.
The Let us explore pile goes into your scoring process. See the Idea Scoring Scorecard guide for three models you can use depending on the stakes and complexity of what you are evaluating. The Interesting pile gets revisited at the end of the scoring cycle. Some will move forward, some will not. The Not for now pile gets a respectful, brief response.
