Be Less Zombie

28Innovation Trapdoors

How to quickly find any fatal flaws hidden inside your idea.

Done well, innovation is the pursuit of truth.

It's the search for an elegant solution to an accurately understood problem in context. And that search is trying to correctly answer two questions about an idea: Should we build it? Could we build it?

Invariably, we're so wired to do stuff, that ‘could’ is off and running before ‘should’ gets a look-in.

The familiar endgame is investment decisions based on subjective half-truths that lead to expensive abject failures.

© Elvin Turner.

The more truth we trade in, the greater our chances of success, and the lower the potential pain of failure. But when political agendas, biases, blind spots and sloppy work get involved, the purity of the truth is compromised.

One of the biggest truth-benders in innovation is the untested assumption. It's the main reason that up to 90% of new products fail. It's innovation's nemesis.

But what do we expect? Emotional, irrational, political, overcommitted human beings are at the wheel. Truth can have shades of grey, be difficult to uncover, or be plain inconvenient when we're running at the speed of twenty-first-century business.

But speed and convenience aren't always the issues. Often, it's pure infatuation. We form ...