“I Know You Just Love My Idea!”
I get really excited when a new idea somehow gets into my head. It may not be original thought, as some of our ideas have been waiting around for millennia or a chance to germinate. Some died an earlier life where circumstances may have starved it. Some were just bad ideas. But when I think I’ve got a good one, I get charged up and stay up all night trying to give it legs.
I always want others to like it and in some way, feed my ego. I have wanted it a lot, so I did not push hard on others to tell me why they did not like it, or seek skeptics for hard-to-take feedback. I’ve been lucky to have learned that my approach was dumb-dumb. My first question should have been, is this worth my time? Then, should I pursue this idea and invest in it? Do I have an understanding of the nature of constraints and obstacles I will need to resolve and overcome? At what point in my development process do certain questions and answers belong? Can I objectively differentiate opportunity from stubbornness or obsession? It’s not nearly as bad as those (in the field of megalomania) who exhibit the attitude with others that, “You just don’t get it. Why can’t you see I’m right all the time?” If we’re lucky, Darwin is taking care of some those guys.
I confess that I find the questions may be to easier ask and more difficult to answer. I have observed that we can become identified with, or defined by, the eventual success or failure of our ideas. This has usually created a motivation not to kill it. I have come to believe that what we may ascribe as constancy of purpose and courage to push through may, in fact, be blinders to time spent creating opportunity costs. Often, I believe, that a big barrier to innovation is the starvation it suffers at the price of chasing poor ideas.
It is a challenge for leadership to get this right. Creating an environment where our go-forward decisions are given the benefit of a baptism in the skeptic waters is essential. This is true for leaders in private and public sectors alike. One challenge is often one created by history. History often is a commentary that more often strings together the stories of winners and successes, with less attention to losers and failures. We tend to learn more about why the writer believes something worked, filtered with some simplification for readability. History is less attentive to the many who lost and the details of why they lost. When I studied for my engineering and business degrees, I don’t recall much time spent on skepticism as a decision making tool.
This may sound paradoxical, if not weird, but I believe that history (include business learning) is written with disproportionate attention to the winners for the future. Perhaps more history written with attention to losers for the sake of understanding the past may be more essential (Some of the best books I’ve read bring this lens). What were the decisions made or overlooked that precipitated failure? Is revisionism true, the kinds that ascribes definitive cause and effect, or are there still many unexplainable that we need consider? What were the assumptions that blinded the view? What did Sony really learn about Betamax, or Ford with the Edsel or Germany with Enigma or Kodak with film, or … Hubris as a business and leadership cataract?
The current upheavals in the multi-polar economies have set new playing fields for our enterprises. If that is true, there is probably no better time to rethink how we decide how to go forward. It is a good time to ask ourselves whether history, as we have it, should be revisited with a fresh set of questions.
Is it time to name a Chief Skeptical Officer?
