Counting Down Our Top Ten List Of Discovery Driven Planning Misses – Part 1 (10 Through 6) (1)

Counting Down Our Top Ten List Of Discovery Driven Planning Misses Part 1 (10 Through 6)

Through Valize, Ron Boire and I have been working with clients to use the tools we have developed to bring Discovery Driven Planning / Discovery Driven Growth to life. Although we’ve got years of experience doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still pretty jarring to take on a project with a company only to find the same mistakes popping up over and over. As a public service, therefore, we share our current top 10.

#10: Succumb to corporate pressure to allocate half the budget and meet an unreasonable deadline to launch your idea. You’re doomed before you start.

This is one of the great paradoxes of allocating resources to new and therefore highly uncertain things. They often take a long time to gestate, and the funding for the earliest stages is best managed with multi-source, small budgets for tinkering around, as Safi Bahcall points out in his excellent book Loonshots. But when you are ready to take the project to market, a corporate commitment needs to be made.

And that is often where things go terribly wrong.

#9: Create a project team before you even know what skills will be critical to the success of the venture. Instead, design the concept first, then back into what skills you’ll need

So you want to launch an innovation??

Cool – let’s see who should be on the project team. Well, Vichu just rolled off his last project, so he’s available. Jenny wants to take on a stretch role as part of her own growth plan, so I think she’d be happy to volunteer. Barry is still tied up with that big joint venture integration, but he could probably spare a day or so a week….

#8: Having a hackathon or boot camp and feeling that this obligates you to develop those ideas further even when the numbers suggest that it might not be the most attractive date at the party.

A chemical company goes into apparel. A bank decides its going to be in the information business. A manufacturer of packaging supplies thinks this gives it the right to win in the logistics business. All cases of good ideas that should have been challenged along the way.

#7 Approving and funding a venture that, even if wildly successful, isn’t going to lead to material growth for the mothership.

Both Geoffrey Moore and Alberto Savoia are united on this one. For a large company to take on the risk and effort of doing something transformational, the prize has to be worthwhile. As Alberto puts it, “lions don’t hunt mice. It isn’t that they don’t have the capability or the talent to hunt mice, its just that its not worth the energy.”

#6: Give the project to a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers who have never been trained in the disciplines of value creation

You would never hand your quality program over to the intern. You would never rely on a junior associate to make sure you were appropriately handling legal risks. It wouldn’t occur to you to put mission-critical operational infrastructure under the control of the marketing department. And yet, when it comes to innovation, we frequently hand projects over to complete amateurs and expect them to know how to do it..

Go-to innovation resources Some go-to resources I like are Curt Carlson’s book and blog on the innovation practices they developed at SRI International, which took an organization that was on its knees financially and turned it into a reliable engine for creating billion-dollars businesses. Alex Osterwalder’s books and articles introduce innovation ideas in a user-friendly and accessible way. Our friends at Innov8rs have pulled together an incredible collection of resources and a big community of innovation professionals grappling with similar issues. Gina O’Connor, now a professor at Babson, has published a series of in-depth books on radical innovation and what it takes.

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