Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg (Denmark) is a researcher, public speaker, and co-author of Innovation as Usual, published by Harvard Business Review Press. He speaks at events around the world and has been named as one of the world’s 20 most influential thinkers. He can be followed at www.wedellsblog.com.
Several years ago, as I was finishing a 2-year MBA degree, I decided to start my own company. The idea was simple: create a private online community for the alumni of the world’s top-tier business schools. The idea was inspired by the social network ASmallWorld, which had great success then.
At the time, I had a couple of months left of my MBA, so when one of my professors offered a course in entrepreneurship, I enrolled immediately. Thus, just prior to launching my startup, I received a thorough education in all the mistakes that startup founders typically make.
And then—to my great retrospective horror—I went out and made many of those mistakes. And they weren’t only trifles. In short, my bad decisions ended up killing my startup.
A special kind of idiot?
The fate of my startup triggered a round of deep introspection. I’ve always regarded myself as a reasonably intelligent person, and I have gradually built up a CV that points in the same direction: I’ve published a book at Harvard, and companies around the world now hire me to give talks to their leaders. But the failure of my startup was an unpleasantly concrete testimony that I was perhaps not quite as smart as I thought. It is one thing to make mistakes as you try to build a company, but you have to be a special kind of idiot to make mistakes that you already know are typical startup mistakes. Right?
I share this story because it offers a crucial piece of advice for being successful with innovation, whether in a startup or elsewhere. In the period that followed, I began to understand what had gone wrong. On the surface, my mistakes were varied: I chose the wrong business partners, I made the website far too complex, and I used far too much energy on our competitors. But there was a common denominator to all these things: the role of my intuition.
Death by feature creep
Take, for example, the decision about how many features the first version of my website should have. I knew very well that it was essential to get a “bare bones” prototype out into the real world as fast as possible. I also knew that founders systematically underestimate how much time it takes to build something. But the idea of launching a half-finished site felt so wrong—so much against my gut feeling—that I didn’t do it, but instead chose to put a load of features on the site. As a result, launching the site took a fatally long time.
The pattern was the same in my other mistakes: I relied too much on my intuition. And that applied especially in the situations where my intuition felt strong—that is, where I had a very clear sense that I was right. In those situations, I often chose to follow my gut feeling, although both my advisers and the startup literature unambiguously pointed in another direction.
Big mistake. The truth is both simple and uncomfortable: The strength of your gut feeling has nothing to do with whether your gut feeling is right.
Three steps to a better gut feeling
The ability to use your intuition selectively is in my view the most important discipline that you must master to succeed with innovation. This is the case because there is currently a great deal of good advice available out there about how to build something new—including the advice in the book you’re holding now. But none of that advice is of any use if you don’t have the ability to recognize when your intuition may err—and the discipline to follow up on that recognition in your actions, even if it feels wrong. In the following, I share three pieces of advice that can help you in this process.
1. Understand the limitations
Firstly, it is necessary to realize when you shouldn’t trust your intuition. This is a subject that researchers such as Robin Hogarth and Daniel Kahneman have studied for years, and their research has offered a clear rule of thumb: Your intuition is reliable if and only if the decision is of a type that you’ve made many times, and if you’ve got clear feedback on those decisions.
Golfers who train their putting game get clear and immediate feedback on every stroke, and after hundreds of strokes, they develop a good intuition for reading the course’s slope and distance correctly. Interviewing job candidates, on the other hand, is an area where the research shows that you should not trust your intuition about a candidate. Most people do not recruit very many applicants, and, as a rule, the feedback on a recruitment decision is both delayed and complicated by a large number of other factors—which means that your intuition doesn’t get trained properly. And indeed, the research shows that interviewers who rely heavily on their intuition systematically make poorer recruitment decisions.
The next time you’re about to make a big decision, ask yourself: Have I made this type of decision many times before? And have I gotten good feedback on my choices? If the answer to one of these questions is no, you should be wary about listening to your gut feeling—even if it feels strong and right.
2. Create a framework for the important decisions
A second good principle is to create a framework for decisions that you (or your staff) often make. In my book Innovation as Usual, I talk about creating an architecture for your decisions—that is, establishing structures and processes that help you avoid systematic errors.
An interesting example is found in Prehype, a New York–based venture development company that builds startups together with large businesses, and on which I recently published a case study (Startup as a Service: The Prehype Model, IESE Publishing, February 2016).
When working with their clients to build products and services, Prehype constantly runs into the problem that I experienced myself: feature creep, or the temptation to add far too many features to a product. To avoid this, Prehype has institutionalized a simple rule: if it will take more than 100 days to launch the first prototype, then the idea is too complex. As I relate in the case study, this 100-day rule and similar principles have made it possible for Prehype to build a number of successful ventures in a very short time without falling into the perfectionist trap that killed my own startup.
3. Accept that it feels wrong
The last principle has to do with managing your emotions. People often say that you should be ready to “step out of your comfort zone” when you work with innovation—and that sounds reasonable enough. But in my experience, that mildly anodyne expression doesn’t really capture how horribly, gut-churningly wrong it feels to go against your intuition. I’m a perfectionist by nature, and if I so much as think about launching something half-finished, it’s as if my whole being rises up in protest.
It’s a very strong feeling, and it’s difficult to ignore. But that is nevertheless precisely what you should prepare to do once in a while if you are in the business of creating something new. Accept that the road to success will sometimes require you to make decisions that feel wrong—and then try to find small, simple ways of testing your intuition, so it will be trained to understand that it’s not always right. Your gut feeling is useful, but it’s not a perfect tool—and you can quickly get into trouble if you don’t learn to take its limitations into account. I learned the hard way. Don’t follow my example.
Creative minds don’t follow rules, they follow will.
Amit Kalantri