By Scott Anthony
Breaking up is never easy. It can be especially difficult if you are a leader “breaking up with” an innovation project that one of your teams still believes in passionately. But, making these calls is a critical part of the innovation journey, and when done well can produce a positive outcome across the board.
Any time you commission an innovative project, failing to achieve your objectives is a real possibility. The more innovative the idea, the more it rests on assumptions that may or may not pan out. Over the past decade, tools and techniques have been developed to better manage those assumptions, and there’s been a dramatic decrease in the cost of developing and testing ideas.
This means you can assess a project’s viability much more efficiently than before. But that doesn’t change the fact that a good idea in theory might not be a good idea in reality. A promised benefit that worked in the lab might not work at any kind of commercial scale. It can be hard for teams working on an idea to view the situation objectively. In the fog of innovation, data are rarely crystal clear.
Tough penalties for failing to deliver against commitments may make it in everyone’s interest to keep pushing ahead. And decision-makers may get seduced by a team’s passion for a project.
But when it is clear an idea isn’t going to work, perpetuating it can sap your organization’s innovation capacity and energy. Here’s how to start the conversation:
- “The data doesn’t lie.” It is far easier to break up with an idea if you’ve been clear from the beginning about what success looks like and have brought rigor to the process. You should always have “Hope”—a hypothesis, objective, prediction and execution plan to measure and test the prediction.
- “Think of the other things we could be doing instead.” Executives should never look at an idea in isolation. Outlining other more attractive opportunities both for corporate resources and the team itself can make the breakup more palatable.
- “We had some great times, and i don’t regret them at all.” Every time you innovate, Rita Gunther McGrath reminds us, two good things can happen. You deliver some kind of commercial or operational benefit. Or, you learn something that enables a future commercial or operational benefit. Capture that learning and recognize that something truly useful has happened.
When done constructively the net result of this kind of breakup is almost always positive. That time and attention can now be redirected toward new ideas.
Scott Anthony is the managing partner of Innosight. His new book is The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market.