Are Your Ideas Up To Your System, mutatis mutandis, Your Market?

The internet and the advancement of search engines and social media platforms that constantly suggest to us content we often search about, sometimes loads us with tons of ideas that we fall in love with and we become excited to execute. Some practices are great at generating ideas and executing them, they have a process of understanding what value an idea creates and quickly identify who would benefit from it. However, many practices implement ideas without having enough evidence of the results that they bring as well as the significance of their effects. An idea can help the business by delivering a new product, a service, or improving an old service or process and generating profits. An idea can be to improve customer experience or any part of the business: marketing, advertising, managerial, design, furniture, or displaying products.

Sometimes we have tons of ideas and we are unable to execute them for time constraints, resources, or simply because they conflict with other ideas. When companies find themselves in an idea conflicting situation it is because they cannot determine the difference in the value each idea provides and the stakeholder it will benefit. An idea can significantly increase customer satisfaction with a considerable increase in the cost of the service. As a result, we may very well end up selecting another idea that can slightly improve customer satisfaction because it costs way less. To avoid these ubiquitous mistakes we need to focus on training ourselves to select great ideas using small-scale experiments that not only save us from expensive mistakes but also help us identify and select growth and profit potential ideas and avoid launching ideas on a wing and a prayer.

TEDx speaker, Sabina Nawaz, invites managers to ask six questions to have a better perspective on an idea: What stands you out? What’s missing? What would our critics say? What would our premortem reveal? what would someone on the frontlines who doesn’t have our context say? How would our competitors celebrate if we were successful? By asking What stands out? to the audience we’re trying to pitch an idea we can get a lot of information if we were articulate and we transmitted the whole idea or if we were missing important information that affects their decision. We cannot execute an idea without knowing what critics say and if you can defend your perspective or have to accommodate. Thinking about what could go wrong reveals many paths we can choose as alternatives. Your strongest criticism will come from your competition once the idea is executed, so instead of thinking about how you are going to beat your competition think about how they will react to your idea and how they will criticize it.