BIG Tools is a hands-on toolkit for the BIG Ideas workshop process. It takes an early insight — something you noticed, something that bothers you, something that could be — and walks it through six tools until you have a pitch you can defend and a hypothesis you can test.
If you've ever filled a whiteboard with sticky notes and then had no idea what to do with them the next morning, BIG Tools is for you.
What it is
Six tools and a progression board:
- Reframe — sharpen a rough insight into a problem worth solving
- Next Great Thing (NGT) — generate a divergent set of ideas, fast
- Filter — pressure-test ideas against your audience, context, and constraints
- Steal like an artist — borrow proven patterns from adjacent fields
- Mixtape — curate the survivors into a coherent set
- Pitch — shape a promising idea into a crisp narrative
Each idea flows through the Kanban board from insight to How-Might-We question to testable hypothesis to resolution. You can pick a different LLM at each stage, promote only the candidates worth carrying forward, and export the full journey when you're done.
Who it's for
Students working through the BIG Ideas workshop — capture what you notice, sharpen it, and walk it through the progression. The tools do the structuring; you do the thinking.
Instructors and workshop hosts running cohorts — give your students a shared toolkit and vocabulary, and watch how ideas evolve across the cohort. RTL layout and a Hebrew translation are built in.
Why we built this
The BIG Ideas process is powerful because it moves you from "I noticed something" to "here's what we're shipping" — but the steps in between are the hard part. BIG Tools exists so that each step has a clear shape: an input, a prompt, a small set of candidates, and a decision about what to carry forward.
You don't have to remember what stage you're on or how to phrase a How-Might-We question. The tool holds the structure so you can spend your attention on the idea.
Getting started
- Sign in at bigtools.dev
- Open BIG Tools from the sidebar
- Drop in an idea — a sentence, a paragraph, whatever you've got
- The tool starts you in NGT. At each stage, promote 1–5 candidates to carry forward
- When you hit Pitch, you'll have a narrative you can share
BIG Tools is free during the student beta. If you're running a workshop and want to onboard a cohort, get in touch — we'll help you get set up.