Every now and again I am reminded of the reasons why I am where I am. The title of this post should give you a clue. It’s called your idea is good but…
Being a business lecturer, I have the opportunity to meet all kinds of people. A lot of them have good ideas. Here’s the critical thing:
Who else thinks your idea is good?
Take for example the amount of people who come up with a ‘great idea for a movie’ or ‘the next big thing.’ The thing is you may be right. It could be the greatest thing in the entire history of things. A burning question then is: why?
The world is a big place. There are lots of people in the world… therefore: How do you know that other people will find your idea as appealing as you do? Think for a moment why we have people in the world that deliberately make movies that follow the same formula. Sure, there are great movies like Inland Empire that break the mould. However, the modern narrative form is what people want, by and large, when they go to the movies. We can argue as long as there is wind, that it’s wrong, right, indifferent. But, it remains. The same goes for your idea. How do you know others think it will be equally as awesome?
The key to learning that is to find ways that you can get closer to realising that. Market research, talking to people, walking outside… you name it.
So next time you have the big idea, find a soundboard, a critical friend or some way of putting to the blowtorch to it. Not only will this process tell you how good the idea is, it will save you the humiliation of finding out that you where the only person who thought winged shoes where a great idea.
Well after a year of incredible dissonance I have returned, like I promised in April. Yes, I am that busy. What I am saying is probably bullshit.
Here goes:
People don’t solve problems they create them
Radical idea. Not really. When a problem forms people don’t actually ‘solve’ it. They invent another problem in it’s place to solve it. See, it’s all about learning to live with what we can and ignoring what we can’t.
Welcome to the hall of awesomeness.
Sudden sound effects are important. Why? They define the way in which my research has hit the virtual wall in the last 18 months. It’s a good thing. The following has happened to me from a series of unnamed journals and conferences during that time:
Six papers were rejected (outright)
Two papers sent back from conferences
Two grants were rejected
Several ideas I had (at least nine) were denied funding and have gone nowhere
There have been some excellent victories. I got a grant for my work in complex problem solving and wrote two papers (one is under review) and I was accepted without changes into the Academy of Management’s Managerial and Organisational Cognition roundtable. That was a major victory. So why write this on a blog?
You have to keep failing in order to find success. How many times have you seen it written? Failure is what happens most of the time. The rest of time I think we just get lucky. So what’s the alternative? Be normal? I was never normal. Be like the rest? The ants? Come on you are better than that. You want to be brilliant you think it just going to fall from the sky? Never! I will write many papers in the future that will get rejected. The next one probably will. Yet, I know that at some point one will be accepted and people will read it. Like they did with this one.
I think I have neglected this blog, which is a shame because I have always found this space rewarding. When I started three years ago, I felt as if I was trying to be somebody I wasn’t or write something I shouldn’t. I was trying to write up a paper this morning on my experiences in a failed business attempt when I realised something. In a lot of areas of my life, including this one, I often come across as though I am someone else. It’s formal, not informal, complex and creative yet not me. The posts which are the most like me are the one’s that I think get read less.
Is it a crime to write as though you were someone else online?
No. But what does it say about the bloated doctor on the other end of the keyboard typing this sentence? So what is the bloody point if you aren’t going to do or say the things you think need to be done and said? You get depressed, tired, withdrawn and overall very weird. Yet, there is a timing and wisdom in this that involves taking the time to find your voice. You start with copying, trying on ‘dad’s shoes’, pretending and so on until you realise, this is me. I am the kind of person who has a hard time selling out and my body lets me know almost immediately if I am doing it. I get depressed, can’t sleep, get angry and so forth. When you begin to find your voice, it’s a good feeling, you are you and know it. You settle in on some things. The words flow from the chubby fingers to the keyboard with ease, the revisions seem less important and you even begin to like the editing process a little bit.
The voice is like the sweet spot on a picked lock. Perhaps the wrong metaphor, yet the obscuring face of the lock from what lies behind is more than likely apt. Consider then that on the other side of this metaphorical door lies the chamber of secrets to your voice. What key wouldn’t you try? Yet, the only way you can find your voice is to use it until you get the key that fits. Unless of course the lock is in another room, behind a gate, guarded by a moat filled with alligators (or crocs if you are from Australia). The point is: you are you and you should tell you not to sell you out for a few dollars. Be you, yes you, because you have to live with you. Don’t YOU forget that.
Often when we come to teach at University we think we need to find ‘cool things’ or some trick to get them engaged. This isn’t true. Consider Xtranormal. This first video was my reflection on the semester… I think it worked well and acted as a way to get them talking:
These videos were well received, at least by me The following was one we made with the whole class, including myself and Alison, inputting their ideas as we discussed them:
The only point I have is this: it doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to be trendy, ok that’s two points. Be clever and work collaboratively, you may be surprised what you learn.
The theory of the day is the long tail, a reworking of the Pareto Principle (i.e. 80% of the wealth of Italian landowners is concentrated in the hands of 20% of the people), which seeks to explain why hits and misses wind up where they do. In real terms the idea is a useful w to explain why, in theory, 80% of all that’s consumed accounts for 20% of all products and so on. Ironically, this is not a reflection on taste as the following video explains, it’s a reflection of the method of distribution and supply (I call it pipe size). Yet this is not what determines a ‘hit’. Not in my opinion. A hit is determined by many different things… which I will talk about in a minute.
Pipe size has to do with a number of things. We all have a certain amount of influence and as such we can distribute messages to people via our own methods of communication. When someone in the family dies or a baby comes along, the pipes of family communication get to work and the word spreads. Some us are more influential ‘sneezers’ as Seth Godin calls them, and we can have a broader impact. But it’s not a formula and neither is it a constant reason why. The concept of ‘engagement’ or ‘resonance’ as someone else I know put it, explains why things are spread around. We participate. When this occurs on a massive scale the network gets bigger, the pipes get bigger and massive demand is generated.
The long tail works as a technical explanation quite well, that is, it explains how ‘pipe size’ and demand and supply corroborate to create ‘hits’. Yet, it fails to adequately explain why hits occur. This fails in the realm of the unpredictability of human ‘systems’. Human systems form groups, make meaning and do what I call ‘engage’. William James said it this way, ‘the truth is something that happens to an idea… not the idea itself’ (that’s a paraphrase by the way). While I don’t wish to debate the idea of what truth is, I want to touch on what James was saying in my lateral understanding of it anyway. Why things become popular can be stated as: they become popular because we engage with it on a massive scale (big pipes), we spread it around and share it (talking –> see Tipping Point, Idea Virus), and we resonate or engage with it. This latter concept, the idea of engagement is the most understated yet most powerful because big pipes don’t guarantee a hit, engagement does. What level of participation do people have in an idea? A high amount, then you have success, a low amount depending on the context you have a different kind of success, or you have a failure.
Success and failure come down to audience engagement yet we cannot ignore pipe size, marketing or methods of supply. We have to consider these as important, yet the level of engagement, discussion and talk around a product or idea and the overall level of activity, is what propels a product to success. This is what the publishing, music and other industries know and exploit all the time. Consider this qoute from a well known literary Agent Donald Maas:
The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the customer is already familiar with the author. In other words, readers are buying brand-name authors whose work they have already read and enjoyed. The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies … samplers, first chapters circulated by email, Web sites and the like. In most cases, someone reads a novel, gets excited about it, and tells a friend. (Taken from Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas).
Now we know this and we can reliably track all success (yes I said ALL!) down to people. You know why, everything social is social. Wow, it took three degrees for me to work that out but it’s true. Everything social is social. Nothing happens without people. We have fancy ideas such as those found on the shelves of Borders yet in reality the process of sharing information and excitement has not changed ever. What is hard to know is what is likely to be a hit and what is likely to be a miss. Pipe size has a lot to do with it of course. The bigger the pipes, the bigger the exposure. Yet, in this world of media falling apart and the growing disintermediation of media, the pipes are awfully big and the potential for sharing for word of mouth is the biggest and most responsive it has ever been thanks to the internet. Still this is no guarantee of resonance, or engagement, big pipes don’t guarantee success
I will finish part 1 with a story on the recent television phenomenon Flash Forward.
A colleague of mine pointed me towards twitter search a while ago and sent me a link when Flash Forward was on. I watched as real time feedback about the show, jokes and other randomness came up one tweet at a time. I saw people saying what they liked and didn’t like about the show to their friends on the twitter (sorry couldn’t resist) and then sharing with others in other networks these thoughts. Watching the conversations go through in real time showed me how unpredictable and different we really are, and how the idea of the long tail is relevant. Now on to Part 2… Coming Soon: Engagement and why things become popular!
“The man with a new idea is a crank… until it succeeds” – Mark Twain
A wise man once told me that there is a high price to new ideas. I thought he was talking about venture capital! No, he was talking about the cost of innovation. It takes great balls of fire to innovate, when it’s easier to do what we have always done in order to succeed. True innovation is the riskiest risk there is, to use terrible English, because when you are ‘out there’ in the deepest depths (there I go again) of the blue ocean, there is nothing to hold on to. I am not talking about your small and slow gradual innovations, I am talking about innovations that change things. The punctuations, the extended uncut directors editions that remodel the ending so it’s new. I am in a metaphorical mindset at the moment, I should pen a Tom Peters’ guru book … I might just sell two copies. I have a self-created reference for describing this process I call it: Engaging Concepts. It’s the forefront of innovation, the grey bits inbetween the new stuff where thought and reality congeal for the first time. It’s a bloody scary place, with very little predictability or repeatability.
The high price of new ideas
New ideas come with a price. There is adjustment period, rejection or acceptance but there is also a chance for improvement. There are a few people I know who I would put in the Mark Twain category. These are people I like to call thought innovators. You don’t find their papers in the Academy of Management Review, or Management Information Systems Quarterly, no you find them in a shed, outside or putting out their radical ideas into the community somewhere else. It’s as if people who are thought leaders get punished until enough people come around. Does this make them special? No, it does not. It does make them worth listening to, if you can filter out the strange things they say and the weirdness of their lives.
So where does the cost come in?
The cost comes in when we realise the risk. Risk management is all about minimising or eliminating risk, it’s not really about innovation. You have to take tremendous risks sometimes to innovate. You have to say, ‘to hell with this we have to try it and see what happens – we can’t know the variables in this case’. I think most of the great innovations were risky and may have even failed. You know what? They did it. They paid the high price of risk of catastrophic failure and now life is better… in short!
New ideas are often risky, sometimes stupid and other times downright crazy… and there is that. However, as Twain noticed the title of ‘crank’ and ‘genuis’ are one good idea away!
A few years ago I wrote a post about what I was learning from integrating a Tiki Wiki into the curriculum of a course called Mobile Workforce Technologies. Time has passed, wheels have churned and work was done. GUESS WHAT! A paper came from that experience that started on this very blog…
The idea that came to me while we were using the wiki, shaped the final outcome here and I am very happy with this paper. Ideas are not just little things we keep and then throw away. They are things from which BIGGER THINGS can grow. Like papers for example. More than that though, ideas have a way of being carried sometimes way beyond what you intended and can reach bigger and better heights when you let them go. This small victory is a case in point.
Ideas are important and we need to be constantly building, shaping and guiding the ideas we have. We need to stretch boundaries, go beyond what we accept and create more about what is known, we need to build better things from the dust of our past failures. We need to destroy creatively the past sometimes and make new things grow where they need to. Standing still doesn’t work, observing doesn’t work… it’s action and the engagement of new ideas! Get out there and build something awesome right now! DO IT!
I am attempting to do something similar to Alison who wrote a list of things she was interested in as an attempt to find focus. At this point in time I find myself horrendously bored with my work, life and pretty much what I spend 99% of my time doing. Perhaps, boredom is a larger symptom of a dissatisfaction with life itself… especially since I set out with four goals this year and none of them have been reached. Yes, I am whining and so what. You don’t like it … I apologise. This is not a whine though, it’s a structuring activity, I am attempting to build a list of things that I am interested in. So here it is… the master list… in glorious technicolour black and white:
A list that makes my previous list feel less adequate
The art of starting a business (and not failing!)
Internet and internet business
Human problem solving and how that works
Fiction writing
Creativity and design
Gaming
Technology (cool stuff not fixing or repairing computers or programming… I HATE THAT)
Family stuff and values
Existence and reality
Theology, the human spirit and matters of Faith
Music and guitar playing
Film (pimpslap!)
Aid work
Having fun
This is all I could think of right now! Our lives are rich are they not? However, in all the fluff I read there is something I have found to be of value. Recently, in our standard occupational health and safety text, I was led to a section on strategic planning. This sectionthat had some interesting information on how to meet objectives. You have to formulate the steps as a “To” statement (that was my interpretation, upon reflection it probably didn’t say that!!!) To me I think I could summarise what I would want (i.e. the deep down desires) as the following “To” statements:
To start new and interesting business ventures
To write new and interesting fiction
To learn new and interesting things every single day
To somehow contribute to the spirituality of people in a positive way
Now comes the next part. I need the “how”. Dammit! Oh well… at least I have begun my life structuring exercise. I can’t leave it here, I need a how statement of some sort. The “How” puts legs on the “To” statement. For example how would I learn new and interesting things every single day:
How: Make a conscious effort to seek new opportunities to learn interesting things every day by making time to learn something (basket weaving, French, eschatology, step aerobics or fly fishing for example), for a small amount of time everyday.
Now this is a commitment. I am committed! Learning is a way of life for me and I love it. But I only love it while it’s new. Hence, why I want to start new and interesting businesses. I hate the boredom of repetition found in work routines and the mundane grind of administration… if I could I would outsource the ruddy lot of it! In fact I probably do… let’s not talk about that, let’s talk about the how statement. Now, I must work out the how as I possess more clarity that I previously thought I did when I started writing this thirty minutes ago. I am ending this post now because I must meditate on the “how”!
Here’s an idea. In a recent conversation on this blog I have noticed that I hold a particular view about the emergence of strategic direction. For example, when I started this blog I had no particular direction in mind and I had no real niche to draw from. However, I noticed that most of the major direction in my life emerges. Yes there have been times when I intentionally set out to do something and it worked, but the direction it was leading me to wasn’t obvious. Take for example my recent doctorate.
I was told early on that you got a doctorate to become an academic. I have since found that I enjoyed the practical application of ideas so much that I am wondering if I will continue as an academic in the next year. That said, this emerged from the terrible experience of doing a Ph.D. so perhaps I am speaking out of exhaustion, terror and the thought of becoming a lifelong nerd. Nevertheless, I learned through the process that I love applying ideas. I love seeing them at work and I love putting them to use. This emerged through the process.
When I started this blog it was more for personal development. But, I have learned that I like speaking more about general ideas and concepts rather than simply specifically personal development. So I followed the path I was leading myself in. In this sense I wonder if in a lot of real world problem solving endeavours and strategic applications we actually find ourselves following what emerges or if we are trying to make things happen. Emergence means following patterns as we notice them. Is this even possible?
There are clearly times when we plan in advance and it helps us. On the other hand there are times when a direction emerges outside of normal planning and following it seems logical. Now I haven’t adapted these or even thought about them before writing this post. Perhaps I need to put these down into a forum or something… who knows. All I really know is sometimes there is a framework that emerges out of a situation and we should follow it… it wasn’t planned and/or thought out. As a matter of fact this requires an intuitive leap.
In reality most of the things we do require this kind of leap and yet I don’t remember once being told by my lecturers that AT LEAST HALF of my life decisions would require an intuitive leap. We are taught about ambiguity, strategy and so on without ever being told that strategy sometimes emerges out of the muck. I remember once I was looking to buy a new dog. I analysed, thought out the plans and considered the alternatives. One day I woke up and thought I am just going to buy the dog. So I packed up the kids and hammered it down to the Animal Welfare League of QLD to get a dog we had picked off a website.
When we got there, the dog we picked wasn’t suitable. He wouldn’t negotiate the children or even come out of his little house to say hello. I was devastated having driven all the way from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to get a dog! I knew however that the timing was right and I knew intuitively that a dog was there for me. We hassled the volunteer in charge of dog dispersion and after a time she brought out an old dog that loved the kids and was 100% suitable. I can’t say what really made me think that the dog was there… God or perhaps advanced precognition? I just knew that I had to take an intuitive leap. I knew it! As I know now with things in my life… it’s time to take another leap to find the answer to my present problems… but that is a whole other post for another day.
I want to leave you today with this thought… don’t try and make things happen sometimes… just sit back and see if you can see where the pattern (hello FRINGE) is leading you. There is something that you need to do and if you think about it, perhaps with some wise counsel, it will become obvious. It is becoming obvious… though it isn’t quite yet. The thing is as patterns emerge and you follow them without much thought … you find out new and interesting realities that you never knew existed! Happy hunting!
The following was one we made with the whole class, including myself and Alison, inputting their ideas as we discussed them:
