Reasons not to innovate

Been there! These are the strategies I typically take. When all else fails, do your best to influence the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) :wink:


Response: “isn’t this awesome! We have found some white space in the market. We better do this before the competition realizes the same opportunity. Chances are they probably already have something in development. It would be a huge risk not to get something going right away and express it through our system. I’d hate to be the one to tell the CEO in 12 months when our competior launches something like this that we could have been a first mover in the market!” Use the fear of risk to the advantage of the new idea. The new idea isn’t yours, it is inevitable and the only risk is in not following through.

Response: “You don’t see it? Wow, no wonder they were able to do this. Obviously they know things we don’t. Don’t admit to anyone else you don’t understand why they did this, it is insanely obvious.” Flip the incredulous ness from the competitors product into the naysayers.

Response: "exactly, this is why we are getting trounced. We are doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Einstein defined that as the definition of insanity. We will establish a process that looks to do thing differently every time and this will be the pilot program. Please prepare 4 proposals by tommorow on how we do this. " make the business as usual mentality understood as the root of poor performance.

Response: the purpose of a process is to reach a desired result, if the desired result is not being achieved, the process is incorrect. Almost everything special, unique, memorable, and desirable in this world was created by a keen sense of intuition on an insight, confidence, and a lot of hard work.

Those are a few of the tacts I usually take. The most important thing is to understand that while each of these attitudes that Raymond identified are hard to work with, they are typically held by good people who are just scared to make a mistake. The ironic thing is that very fear leads to more mistakes. I try to make them decide to get out of their comfort zone by recognizing that staying in it is the biggest risk of all and that going on record turning down a good idea just to feel fuzzy for a minute is suicide. You are helping them out by helping them to realize this. By deciding to pursue an innovative idea, the team will be heroes. If it works out, it will be amazing, if it fails, we will have learned so much that we can put into the next program.