In the corporate world, a lot of people feel that they should be putting their best foot forward. None wants to accept failure. Such a culture is a problem for innovation. Leaders need to change what it means to put your best foot forward.
This is a difficult thing to admit in most organizations. Most leaders got to their positions through their successes, not their failures. Sales teams get their bonuses based on the sales they make and product managers get bonuses for meeting their revenue targets.
At a startup weekend a few years ago, the companies I was working to encourage the teams to be honest and loyal about the lessons they were learning about the business potential of their ideas. Despite this encouragement, all 12 teams that pitched to us, presented their ideas as having great potential for success.
Best Foot Forward
In established organizations, there is consistent pressure to make a good impression. None wants to admit failure. But this can lead to zombie projects that keep going even when they are not having business impact or success.
But what if we change what making a good impression means?
Innovation is not about the successful execution of a specific project. Innovation is about searching to find value propositions that resonate with customers and business models that are profitable. So every innovation project should be evaluated using one overarching question:
How close are we to finding a business model that works?
Another way to think about this is that we should not tie ourselves personally to any single idea, even if we came up with it. If we view our work as answering the question of how good an idea really is, then there is no wrong answer.
In this situation, the wrong thing to do becomes providing leadership with an inaccurate assessment. You are not putting your best foot forward when you say an idea is good, without evidence from the market that it is. using evidence to stop an innovation project can save the company a lot of money.
Tracking Progress
Innovation teams should provide regular updates covering the following five areas for any project they are working on:
What their idea is and what it might look like if the business model works.
What work they have done so far on the project, such as customer interviews, building prototypes or researching competitors.
What they have learned so far based on the evidence they have gathered and what it means for their idea going forward.
If leaders want to asses a team, it's really about whether they did good job to test their intentions and gather reliable evidence. But leaders cannot evaluate a team based on the outcome that the evidence shows. This is beyond the team's control. The results of the evidence are what they are.
The evidence can show that the team is on track to find a business model that works and they should continue.
Each one of these three decisions represents putting our best foot forward. To continue when the evidence suggests we should stop is foolhardy. Stopping a project with no evidence of traction is a wonderful thing to do and we should celebrate this decision.
Conclusion
To find the best business ideas, we need to make small investments in a number of innovation projects, and only increase investment in those ideas that are showing traction. Putting our best foot forward.
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n the corporate world, a lot of people feel that they should be putting their best foot forward. None wants to accept failure. Such a culture is a problem for innovation. Leaders need to change what it means to put your best foot forward.
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