The Innovation Castle
Success is about problem discovery as well as problem solving. We need a framework that encompasses them both.
Something Better vs Something New
Despite innovation becoming a buzzword for any new idea, creating an innovative solution, one that is a commercial (or social depending on your requirements) success, i.e. people don’t go back to the old way of doing things, is very hard and statistically rare. Simply put, most attempts at creating something new fail.
As a clarification before we get into the weeds of this, doing something ‘new’ that is a tweak or improvement of something that already exists, when your the person or organisation that did the original thing, is much easier. Let’s call this a “something better innovation”… an activity that is trying to keep the dream alive by improving what we have already. Absolutely essential to what many people in all professions do everyday, and perhaps counter intuitively, they are (relatively speaking) actually quite easy. It’s not hard to keep a winning product alive or make an already effective process better with a few improvements and changes, certainly in the short term, we’re typically looking for small improvements after all. Failure here usually stems from complacency and arrogance rather than the difficulty of the task.
However “something new innovation” on the other hand is totally different. This is where the risks flip and failing is basically an inevitability. This is where many of the engineering and design text books stop. The process of creating something new (invention) is hard enough, let alone creating something that other people actually want (innovation).
And so… practitioners in this space seem to fall into one of three camps:
better research will tell you what people want,
you can never know what people want until you show them,
or some messy hybrid of the two (just to hedge our bets).
My experience tells me that research can narrow the field of enquiry but ultimately you only know if you’re right once you show people and even then it’s a long iterative process of trial and error as the finer details, hidden at the start, become (hopefully) visible as you progress.
So what does all this mean? When I talk about innovation, I’m naturally focusing on the “something new innovation” because this is the harder challenge, and lessons learnt here flow down to the “something better innovation” they don’t always flow up. Learn how to do new, and the something better will sort itself out. It’s like driving a manual car, once you can do it well you can easily drive an automatic, but those who learn on an automatic might be blissfully unaware of many of the challenges of driving a manual.
If you understand your way around the castle, using it on simpler projects just becomes second nature and routine. As a manager supervising projects you can ask your team castle based questions; where’s your evidence for X? What’s the vision for Y? What impact are you expecting to see here? Have we a proposal for that? etc… But I’m getting ahead of myself, read on dear innovator…
I hope you find it useful.
Every entrepreneurial success, every innovation, every new idea, concept, plan, lives in a great castle that can seem impossible to capture. But conquer the 8 towers that surround it and victory will be close!
Good luck brave innovator on your quest to a solution!
Introducing the Castle, the fortress that needs to be conquered in order for an innovative idea to succeed and become a solution.
In the middle of our castle, is a great treasure. The goal of all innovation, a solution to a problem! But this winning glorious solution is surrounded by a dangerous moat and beyond that the castle walls surrounding it, with 8 guarding towers, each representing a different aspect that must be triumphed. Once you’ve captured the outer wall and it’s towers, the only way into the centre is through the last tower to fall (impact), having a clear and measurable impact that your idea has achieved the aim it set out to achieve.
This might sound so obvious it doesn’t need stating… Of course an idea can only be a solution if it achieves what it intended to achieve? Well unfortunately this is where your clear and logical mind differs from the actions of most solution hunters out there. We often don’t build up to seeing the impact we want, instead we try to jump over the moat straight to the solution from any other point in the castle…
The moment we come across a problem we leap to a solution “I know how to solve that”…
Once we’ve established a bigger purpose, all solutions become immediately obvious to us…
A bold vision of the future is as good as having solved the problem already…
A hypothesis around what could be the root concern instead morphs into a certainty…
Evidence to the contrary becomes erroneous and irrelevant…
Developing a proposal is a mere formality because the vision is so clear…
Delivery is trivial, there’s no risk of failure…
and then Bam! the impact isn’t what we were expecting and now we really do have a problem.
Rushing to a solution is a common problem, but so is staying forever in a research, vision building phase where it never develops beyond glossy reports and fancy looking plans.
So the idea of the castle is to know the challenge ahead, to be able to see they whole task and also to understand when and where you might want to focus next. It’s not to scale, in the sense that some elements could be done quickly, others might take years, but you’ll know what needs to be done, what needs to revisited and what needs are still left to do.
Do I have to start with a problem? No.
In theory, most people like to start with a problem. It’s the obvious place to begin. But in reality problems are often not clearly defined or really describable until after work has started. Also finding or uncovering an articulated problem is often a state only explainable in hindsight. It’s usually quite common to form a problem that needs to be solved, from one of the other starting points around the castle.
For example one of my son’s wanted a toy castle, and he was very upset we didn’t buy him the one he saw in the shop. As a parent I was trying to teach him that we can’t always buy whatever we see, and living most of my day in a workshop also made me think how ridiculous this was paying quite a bit of money for a cheap looking thing… I could make him a better one for less. So with that in mind I began with a hypothesis, that “I could make a castle he would like”. No grand vision, no defining purpose, no dramatic problem… straight to a question, can I make him a castle he’ll enjoy playing with? So that afternoon (after he’d stopped crying) I designed and made one, slowly a vision for what it could look like appeared and we had a toy castle in front of us. Now for evidence gathering, did he enjoy it? Yes, he loved it.
So with this little example, the entrepreneurs reading this might think, amazing, you should start selling them! But be careful of their enthusiasm, they’re pushing me dangerous close to the moat, trying to get to that innovative solution in the middle straight away.
In reality, all I have is some evidence that one child, my son, loved what his dad made him. He might equally have loved a large amazon delivery box with holes cut in the sides for windows. I have some evidence but it’s hardly robust.
For this idea to be commercially interesting, I have to now go back and fill in all the bits I’ve missed. Change my hypothesis from can I make a castle, to is this type of castle popular? Then develop a clear vision for what how it could be made at scale and how is it different from the competition (amongst many other things). What is my purpose here, am I trying to make money, create some social change or push an environmental message perhaps? And what problem am I actually solving. The toy castle in the shop was fine, I just didn’t want to buy it. So how does it make sense for me to sell my castle? My problem is different for other parents if I’m trying to persuade, because they might not want to buy any castle and I’m trying to persuade them to buy mine instead of someone else’s…
All of these different elements need to be explored, tested and developed in order for this idea to have any meaningful chance of success beyond just dumb luck.
This constant back and forth around the castle is like a lockpicker trying to crack an old fashioned safe. With your hand on the dial, you twisting it one way and then the other… your evidence might suggest one thing, so dial back to check the vision and the problem, then forward again to see how that might affect the impact and whether the impact is desirable, back again to iterate on the vision. And so on…
It’s not a static linear process but a back and forth iterative discovery.
Introducing to you,
The Innovation Castle:
Good luck brave innovator on your quest to conquer it!
Where to start?
You can start at any of the towers around the edge of the castle. Maybe you’ve seen something you’d like to replicate, maybe you come across some fascinating data or an idea that makes you think. Maybe you’re driven by a clear purpose to achieve something. Whatever it is, bring it back to a guiding problem… with this observation or desire in mind, what problem would I be solving? Does solving this problem address our purpose? Can we create a compelling vision that solves this problem? What key insight or hypothesis is this vision founded on? What evidence do we have that supports this? What do we need to make this vision a reality? How would we deliver it? Does it deliver the impact we want to see and will this impact progress my purpose? On and on…
A Recap of the Terms:
Solution: A sustainable long term success. Something that not only works, but something that you want to keep working, or be involved with. It’s not uncommon for innovators to create things they don’t actually want to be a part of. One of my first businesses was a coach service taking students to the better clubs in a neighbouring city. It worked well and was a financial success. So although it made money, the impact beyond that was a lot of evenings with drunk people and in clubs, neither of which I enjoyed. So the impact didn’t align with my purpose and I stopped after a couple years.
Problem: Can you describe in simple terms what is being tackled, what issue are you solving, what is the customer pain you’re addressing? For my student club coaches the problem was an absence of good clubs nearby and a lack of affordable or convenient methods to get home afterwards. I’m reluctant to start my approach by talking about problems, it’s rare in my experience (for ideas involving humans) for the problem you think your solving to actually be the real problem they want you to solve. This discovery only comes through the act of trying to solve the wrong problem first. So don’t get fixated on working out what the problem is before you start. Skip over this stage for now and dream of a wonderful vision for the future, or a fascinating new customer insight / hypothesis. But don’t forget to come back afterwards!
Purpose: What drives you? What would your parents be proud of you for doing? What would your kids be proud of you for doing? What is the company mission that you’re striving towards? What impact are you hoping to make in the world? The purpose of a charity is usually easy to see, they are tackling a specific issue, hunger, loneliness, illness, etc… For companies it can be a bit trickier sometimes to find. For people this might be described as your passion, what do you love? I’ve known many people who did jobs or projects that they weren’t proud of. But they needed the money or the opportunity for something better. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if it doesn’t align with your purpose then it won’t last long term, or you’ll become miserable doing it. Is this a thing you would want to continue even when things got tough? As you’ll see below, having a common purpose is what gels multidisciplinary teams together. They must have the same purpose because their solutions will all be different depending on their speciality and area of influence. If they don’t have the same purpose, none of these solutions will align and support each other. The sports car will have soft comfortable suspension, an underwhelming engine, plenty of boot space etc…
Vision: The fun bit! The dreaming of the future. I’d love to do this, to do it like this, to have that, to be able to do this and so on. Go wild, draw up your concept sketches, write your vision statements. Be a visionary! But once you’ve done all that, remember it has to work with all the other 7 towers. An exciting vision is nothing without the rest to make it compelling and credible.
Hypothesis: What insight do you believe is the keystone to everything else succeeding? In the early days of the internet, many businesses that today are worth billions if not trillions of dollars relied on a key untested assumption, that people would be willing to send a complete stranger, who they had never physically met, their money. Such a huge leap of faith this was, many didn’t think it would ever catch on or happen. This is the territory of Minimum Viable Products… the idea is not to mock up the vision, but to test the hypotheses that underlie it. This is very much the language of Eric Reis in the Lean Startup and the Startup Way and the result leads to evidence. Thought about differently, it might be that you have spotted something unique in one place or culture and you have a theory that this could be an exciting new opportunity somewhere else. That insight is just a theory, a hypothesis until you’ve tested it and brought that back to your problem, purpose and vision. Do they still align? As Eric Reis will attest to, this and evidence are the most overlooked of the stages but arguably are the most important!
Evidence: In the court case of your solution, you have the prosecutor, here are all the reasons why it’s a terrible idea. You also have the defence, here is everything we’ve found that supports it. On the basis of probability we find your team not-guilty of gross misconduct in the journey to an innovative solution. Congratulations, in the words of Steve Blank “you left the building!” and actually tried to gather some evidence your vision might be remotely credible. I believe a key reason why the most successful entrepreneurs are in their 40s is because they’ve spent 20+ years seeing the world and gathering evidence that is suddenly now coming together to support an idea. Don’t rush, you need to find evidence to support your idea. But you’re not looking for proof, in any idea that involves humans you can only go on probability, proof doesn’t exist because we’re not all rational decision makers. So consider the facts and then go with your gut.
Proposal: Depending on your situation, this might be quick or might be a considerable step. If I have ample resources and time then I don’t need to worry too much about the planning in how I will deliver this idea, I’ll be able to muddle through. But for many it might require fund raising, business plan writing, authorisation being granted, budgets being unlocked etc… The proposal stage is all about preparing the fine details that turn a vision into reality. What needs to be in place before we can deliver it?
Delivery: Depending on what stage you’re performing your castle assault, the delivery might be about the actual day to day tasks of making it a reality. Managing my team, money and other resources. Working with other parties, suppliers and stakeholders. Maybe my partner is the sticking point here and we need to create a new working relationship… This is a classic management and operations task for putting into action everything that has been planned. But if you’re using the castle approach a little earlier in your journey and haven’t started working on the delivery yet… what would delivery look like? How would this vision actually get to customers? Assuming the proposal is accepted and funding appears, what will you actually do on day 1? A wonderful local café to me was on the surface a great success, and their social media posts were engaging and developing a large following. However take a step back and you’d have noticed that the theme of many of the posts was the 6 hours of baking she needed to do every evening when she would come home, just to get ready for the next day. The delivery of her vision was clearly unsustainable and within a couple years she’d sold the business to someone else, who quickly reduced the number of cakes on offer!
Impact: The most important stage of them all. If the impact is not what you hope it will be, then you don’t have a solution, you have something else… perhaps a bigger problem then when you started with? Does the impact you’re seeing align with your purpose? Your team was designing the steering for a sports car, do the track results show that the steering is sharp and responsive? Have we created a positive impact or does it need to be redesigned? What about unintended consequences or rebound effects? If you’re still in the planning stage, consider the impacts that your vision might deliver, hopefully they’ll make things better, solving the problem, but could they make other things worse? Or maybe the impact wouldn’t be big enough. I remember years ago helping budding entrepreneurs write their business plans and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to quit their well paid, 9-5, 5 days a week job with a 7 days a week, never sleep, stress filled be their own boss, only to earn less than they did before. Only on reflection does it make no sense and you start to appreciate what you had. Don’t be that guy, consider the impacts before you start, and what evidence do you have that the impacts will be what you dream they might be?
What’s wrong with all the existing models and approaches that are popular today? Why develop a new approach?
They do not encompass the whole picture, usually problem solving focused. They assume you have a starting point, a problem to define and solve. If whilst using the approach you are enlightened enough to discover a new better problem to solve then great. But the tool is not designed with that in mind and so many practitioners produce poor solutions even when the follow the approach.
The Innovation Castle is designed differently. I’ve created it with problem discovery as a foundational element. The key component of the whole process is Evidence. What evidence do you have that you are solving a worthy problem? What evidence do you have that you’re building a compelling vision? What evidence do you have that you’re delivering needed impact?
No other approach that I’ve seen emphasises this.
Why is that? Well I believe most innovation and design approaches have been developed by people or teams who solve problems for others. Engineering departments development systematic methods for creating whatever the marketing department said they needed. IDEO (one of the world’s most famous design consultancies) created ‘Design Thinking’ as their method for solving the problems of their clients. Business schools all over the world create methods and approaches based on the studies of others, not on the practise of doing it themselves, and in hindsight everything looks like a problem waiting to be solved.
Entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and those who start something new however are different. They aren’t problem solving, they’re problem finding. The value of a startup is not in their solution but in their discovery of a new unsolved problem. If we can find a bigger, more worthy, more valuable problem (ideally one that no one else is working on) we have something of great value, because if we can solve it wouldn’t that be amazing!
The difference between doing something yourself and suggesting something for someone else… The Moat of Unjustified Confidence
There’s a big difference between doing something and telling people to do something (or suggesting something be done as a student project perhaps, or even a consultant’s report). When you do something you do many things, consciously and unconsciously to achieve your aim. All of the 8 elements of the castle wall tend to be done naturally, you see a problem, come up with a plan based on a purpose of what you hope to achieve by solving it, during your development you do some tests (intentionally or not) and if it makes it to reality, you see what impact it has on your problem.
However when you suggest something be done it’s common to skip many of the steps. They slow the process down and put obstacles in the way of a good story. This is where projects often try to jump to a solution too early, and fall into the moat, the moat of unjustified confidence.
I see it all the time with student projects, here is a problem (a design brief typically), solve it for me… so what do they do? Spend the entire time allocated on a grand vision and then writing up a detailed proposal. Complete with computer renders and drawings detailed down to the final nut and bolt.
Where did the reasoning for any of this come from? No idea. Can they defend their choices and their decisions? Unlikely, it’s all based on untested hypotheticals. Is there any evidence to support this idea? No, it’s all second hand guesswork.
So what should they do instead?
There’s nothing wrong with having a vision for what the solution might be. But there’s little value in wasting time developing a detailed proposal until you have evidence, until the hypothesis (the key essential element, that without which the idea can’t succeed, CarsDirect.com had this with will anyone send a huge amount of money to a company they’ve never heard of, to a strange website they’ve never seen before, with 1990s internet? Yes they would came as a surprise to them!).
The important bit is testing it. Does anyone want it? We’ll figure out how to make it work later, but right now we need to know people will actually use this, buy this, do this (whatever it may be).
Authority, when to rush and when to be slow…
What level of authority do the stakeholders have?
Do you have to ask permission to do something?
Do you need sign off before you can start experimenting?
Are you working alone or part of a big corporate machine?
Depending on how you answer these questions changes the amount of work you need to do on Problem, Purpose, Vision, Hypothesis and Evidence collecting. Working alone on a project where you have total control (like my toy idea I mentioned earlier) you don’t need anyone’s permission to do anything and everything you’re going to do won’t impact anyone else… then stop wasting time working on vision statements and deep problem research. Hurry up and test something, start collecting real evidence! If the evidence is good you can go back later and fill in the blanks.
On the other hand, if you need budget approval, if you need permission, if the work is going to impact other people. Then stop and prepare your case.
You’re going to need to persuade someone to allow the evidence to be collected. To persuade people you make a compelling vision, you show your deep problem research and are clear on your purpose.
If authority is low, rush ahead to the testing. If it’s high, do what you must to get permission to test.
Success Across Multidisciplinary Teams
A common solution is a myth, instead seek a common purpose.
In large multi-part or multidisciplinary teams, where different people are responsible for different parts of the solution, in a car the suspension team must coordinate with the handling designers, who must work with the driving experience lead etc etc… all to produce the same winning solution. In situations like this, it’s tempting to think we all have to be working on the same solution. That’s obvious isn’t it?
Well yes, but no.
The solution for one team is not the solution for another. The winning idea for the suspension people, is (and shouldn’t be) the same thing the handling designers are working on. They have a bigger frame of reference and one that shouldn’t be tied down to a specific suspension arrangement. Likewise the driving experience lead needs to coordinate many aspects of the car and driving experience, their solution won’t be the same as the handling one.
The answer is simple, seek a common purpose. Purpose transcends team boundaries, it transcends functions and departments. Common vision might be good within the confines of a technical team, but purpose is what rallies a whole organisation. What keeps everyone on the true path and guides every decision to make a single compelling solution.
Zooming in, zooming out…
The same model works no matter the scale of the task. A senior leader, CEO or founder might encompass the whole picture, the whole point of their endeavour. Whilst a sub-team, or single staff member might use it to review just their task at hand for that week. It really doesn’t matter. The only difference is the scope of exploration and questioning.
This is where alignment of purpose is key to everything coming together to form forward progress. Good strategy needs coherent, consistent and coordinated actions, and these are only possible if the purpose is clear and understood across all levels of activity.
A worked example:
Working with a project from a client.
A client has asked you to help them with an idea, and so if we translate the initial kick-off brief into Innovation Castle language: they want a new product ‘proposal’ to help them grow as a startup business. They tell you all about their ‘vision’ for what it could be, the specifics of what they want you to work on and it all sounds exciting but there’s a worry in the back of your mind that to do it properly could be a little too ambitious or the reasoning for it being a good ‘solution’, the ‘evidence’, is maybe a bit questionable…
So depending on the nature of your relationship with the client, we could just accept the money and do what they asked for. That would certainly be the easier approach. Write up a ‘proposal’ and let them work on the ‘delivery’ of it. Good luck!
But in this instance we are really committed to them as an organisation and want to see them reach the best possible ‘impact’ and achieve a great (and real) ‘solution’ rather than a possible wasted initiative. So let’s try to help them make this (or a new) ‘proposal’ the best it can be and think about the whole framework, what’s weak or missing and where we should focus our initial thinking and research.
Using the Solution Castle as a framework to guide our approach to solving this client’s problems.
Phase 1: So the first thing that needs to be done is to review the current situation. Is the proposal based on anything defendable, anything rigorous? Or are we at risk of jumping into the moat?
Phase 3: We’ve created an attractive vision and are testing the hypotheses that it brings up. This is where MVPs and the like come in, testing the experience rather than the product. Can we gather evidence that it could be desirable?
Phase 2: Assuming there wasn’t a convincing story there, we need to go back to the problem and really start to explore what might be wanted by customers and future customers, and what might work for the client.
Phase 4: If the evidence or our conviction of the vision (having gone through this process) is strong, we’re ready to actually do what the client asked for, develop a proposal for them. Good luck, you’ve never been better prepared!
Support for the model in the work of others:
Whilst much of this has come from my own experience or through the many conversations I have with colleagues at the University of Bath or friends who are designers and innovators in industry, I do love it when a famous maker / entrepreneur has similar thoughts.
Tony Fadell has written a fabulous new book: Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making (which while it might be unorthodox, I agree with completely). Tony is the creator of the iPod, the iPhone and founder of Nest. He’s a complete powerhouse in the product design world and a man who has been fortunate to do many great successes and have many complete failures. His opinion on this matter seems an important one. So I was excited to read his thinking and how it aligned with my own. Below are some extracts from his book to reinforce my message. Do read his book, it covers a lot more besides this…
Tony’s first major design failure was a product called the Magic Link for a now defunct company called General Magic back in 1994. The reason for the failure, despite enormous technical progress, was it “would not solve real people’s problems.” Then later at Philips he joined to lead a team that “were focused on what they could make, not why anyone would want it.” This reinforces the notion that having a real problem is a key step, it’s also fundamental as to why new products fail. I talk about this a lot in my idea that there are only two reasons for product failure: You don’t know how to do something or you don’t know why you’re doing it.
Chapter 2.2 Data vs Opinion was a fascinating read and the reason why my bottom most tower is called Evidence and not Experiments as it was in an earlier draft. His logic is compelling and reminded me that whilst evidence can be substantial it’s often not complete. I liked the term Experiments, as that is what you need to do, but it implies you can keep doing them until you have a data-based decision and Tony rejects that. For human centred problems it’s an opinion-based one. “Every decision has elements of data and opinion, but they are ultimately driven by one or the other… but data can’t solve an opinion based problem. So no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive... talk to the experts and confer with your team. You won’t reach consensus but hopefully you’ll be able to form a gut instinct. Listen to it and take responsibility for what comes next.”
“Customer panels cant design for shit. People just cant articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if you’re considering something completely new that they they’ve never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible… you need a hypothesis and that hypothesis should be part of a bigger product vision.” If you have no core hypothesis that tests the product vision then any testing you do is “just shovelling data into the void”. It’s superfluous to the core vision being pursued and a waste of time and money. So collect your data, but don’t waste your time with experiments that are irrelevant to your hypothesis and ultimately trust your gut and move on, or back.
“You can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist… Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.”
Tony’s development journey at Nest frequently stopped to consider new problems, new evidence, new hypotheses that could undermine the vision and sink the whole endeavour. One such hypothesis was that if they could not transform the ease of installation of their new thermostat, the whole project might never get off the ground. So they developed their own screwdriver. They could have just included a few cheap standard screwdrivers in their box, but by resetting the innovation castle with this new problem in mind they not only created a whole new vision for what a screwdriver could be, they created a previously untouched impact. By ensuring the purpose of the screwdriver was to improve sales of the thermostat by aligning with the whole customer journey it became a complete success story in it’s own right. Being used for years after the thermostat was installed and quickly becoming their customer’s favourite DIY tool, sparking conversations and generating sales leads for many years in every customer’s home.
Chapter 3.4 “Your first adventure and your second”. The three things you need to make decisions are:
“Vision: Know what you want to make, why you’re making it, who it’s for, and why people will buy it.” I expand his definition of vision into Purpose and Problem. Having a single term for so many different elements I believe can be confusing and an over simplification when trying to teach people who are starting from nothing.
“Customer insights: What you’ve learned through customer or market research or simply by thinking like your customer. What they like, dislike, what problems they experience and what solutions they’ll respond to.” I call this Hypothesis, all of these ideas are just theories waiting to be checked.
“Data: For any really new product, reliable data will be limited or non-existent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a reasonable attempt to gather objective information… but this information will never be definitive. It won’t make your decisions for you.“ The all important evidence.
The Innovator’s quest through the castle is a constant back and forth, a constant round and round until you make it to the centre or you give up. As such the purpose of a product can change as more as visions are created, evidence is collected and impacts measured.
“Most people don’t realise what the iPod was originally built for. It’s purpose wasn’t just to play music, it was made to sell Macintosh computers… People will love it so much that they’ll start buying Macs again.” Why? Because it could only work with a Mac, to start with… but the v2 could work on a PC, against Steve Jobs wishes, and ironically this popularity of the iPod among a lower cost customer base resurrected the company and saved Apple. Cheaper PC users loved the iPod so much they started looking at Apple’s other products and Apple cemented itself as a pioneering desirable brand.
Many other great product successes changed purpose on their route to becoming successful solutions. Bubble wrap, before its huge success in the packaging industry, was a novelty wallpaper. Playdoh was a product for cleaning soot off your walls and even Sony’s Walkman, the product that changed music listening forever and so inspired the iPod that Jobs wanted to name it the Macman before his lawyers warned him against it, was intended as a niche product for students to help them study at night.
So don’t be afraid to change your purpose, adjust your vision, retest your hypotheses and redo the proposal. Change is the only constant. Don’t fight it.
Whilst researching the problem, forming a driving purpose and crafting a vision can take time, Tony says that “no amount of research or delayed intuition will ever guarantee [success].” So don’t hang around, keep moving forward collecting evidence that what you’re doing is working and revisit the stages when this evidence presents challenges to what you had thought was correct, or finished, or done.