Making Uncertainty and Ambiguity your Allies
Innovation either needs to be great or needs to be abandoned or pivoted.
The plan that delivers the proof points is the learning plan.
The key to the learning plan is to focus on proof.
Transcript
Making Uncertainty and Ambiguity your Allies
Hi, I’m David Matheson, president and CEO of SmartOrg. We’re all about helping companies make great decisions every time. And I’d like to share a tip with you from my interactive workshop on making uncertainty and ambiguity our allies for innovation projects.
And the tip is this: focus on learning plans, not execution plans. See, most companies develop execution plans. This is about getting the work of the project done—interviewing customers, doing technical designs, testing out things, and so on.
And those are great, but they miss the main point about innovation, which is innovation either needs to be great or needs to be abandoned or pivoted—maybe a better word for saying so. The key to the learning plan is to focus on proof. Now, proof is generally those questions that are outside of your comfort zone. They’re gut-wrenching things, but you know that if you deliver evidence on them, they’ll either make it obvious you need to double down on this project and just go. Or if they don’t work out, pretty much the idea’s not gonna work. And you want to do that quickly and cheaply.
So the plan that delivers the proof points is the learning plan, and that’s the key to success in innovation and making uncertainty and ambiguity your allies.
