CHAPTER 1
Getting Unstuck

Paul Simon was once interviewed on the Dick Cavett show talking about how he wrote “Bridge over Troubled Water.” He described how the first idea came together, and said, “Then I was stuck.” Cavett asked him, “What do you mean by stuck?” and Simon said, “Everywhere I went led me to where I didn’t want to be, so I was stuck.”¹

This book is for entrepreneurs, investors, managers, social activists, and all kinds of innovators who would like the paths they are on to lead them somewhere they want to go. Some of us find ourselves paralyzed; we cannot figure out what to do next. But more commonly we are stuck the way Paul Simon was, because what we are doing, even when it may look productive, isn’t leading us to where we want to be. Joe Reger was a founder in an early Flashpoint cohort. His company, Springbot, became one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. Joe recently looked back on the to-do list he’d created for himself as he began the company. Every item on the list, things like creating logos and securing meetings with important people in the business, were just the sort of activities that can feel productive but that were going to keep him stuck. Joe says that in retrospect, accomplishing them or not turned out to have nothing to do with leading the company to success. He kept moving, but he was stuck.

Running in directions that don’t lead you to where you want to be isn’t merely unproductive—it’s counterproductive. It not only fails to take you where you want to go but also gives you an excuse to avoid the problems you really need to be addressing.

Paul Simon’s goal was a complete song. An innovator’s goal is a complete innovation. Innovations aren’t complete until they become embedded in the world outside the innovator’s head. So, unlike a complete song, a complete innovation depends on other people adopting it and bringing it into their lives in some way—being involved with it, whether involved means joining the team or investing or partnering or (most important) buying and using the products. A lot of what we talk about here involves companies and products, but innovation goes beyond business. Innovative nonprofits, movements, ideas, and artworks too stand or fall not on their own isolated merits but on one key question: Are the people they’re intended for indifferent to them, or do those people in some way bring the innovation into their lives?

Most of the things modern people do are the result of earlier successful innovations. But that doesn’t mean innovation is easy; it’s extraordinarily hard. Not hard in the sense of requiring a lot of effort (though that’s often needed too), but hard in the sense of not knowing what to do, of getting stuck.

The core of sustained innovation in business and other organizations is reciprocity. The innovator does something that leads other people to do something that enables the innovator to keep doing whatever they were doing. Together, the two sets of behaviors support each other in a repeating cycle, and that’s the mechanism of a complete innovation. Very often the innovation is formed into a product, and the “other people” are a market full of customers. The customers pay for the product, allowing the innovator to keep making it. In noncommercial organizations, such as nonprofits or political movements, reciprocity might be expressed in other ways. This book, though, will focus primarily on business innovations, both for new startups and for large enterprises.

Being stuck, as an innovator, means being unable to get the reciprocal dynamic going. There are many kinds of sticking points. A lot of work has been done, and a lot of advice has been published, on four broad categories of these sticking points: technical, marketing and sales, financial, and leadership.

■ Technology. Innovators often get stuck because they can’t actually make and produce the product they have in mind, complete with the features, costs, and volume production they’re shooting for.

■ Marketing and sales. They often get stuck not knowing how to proceed with getting their product in front of their would-be customers and convincing them to buy.

■ Finance. They often get stuck because they can’t raise money or produce goods and sell them profitably.

■ Leadership. Innovators often get stuck putting together the right team and creating the right culture and work environment to make it all happen.

Go into your local library or bookstore or search the right category at Amazon and you’ll find lots of books to read on each of these subjects.

The premise of this book is that there’s a fifth category, a kind of elephant in the room that is usually ignored or waved away or danced around. Facing the fact that you’re stuck in this fifth category is a courageous act. It’s very easy to duck thinking about it critically until it’s too late. But getting unstuck in this category is the most important job of all, and doing it sheds important light on all the others.

The hidden category is usually called demand, but to distinguish it from random purchasing activity we’ll call it authentic demand. The opposite of authentic demand is indifference. Authentic demand arises when would-be customers experience not buying as a problem, as something they can’t be indifferent to, almost as a violation of something important.

The overwhelming number of business ideas, new products, and startup companies simply don’t meet authentic demand. No reliable statistics are available because definitions of innovation and of failure vary so much. But anecdotally, Clay Christiansen, maybe the most respected of twentieth-century business professors, estimated failure rates at more than 90 percent. At least that percentage of startups fail, and the data shows that the leading reason for those failures is customer indifference. Nonprofits and activist movements also fail at similar rates. Yet these staggering failure rates go mostly unnoticed by the public. Everyone knows the names of big tech company winners—Google, Amazon, Facebook, and so on. For each one of them, scores of search engines, online marketplaces, and social media platforms have gone bankrupt, and few people remember their names.

Overcoming sticking points in technology, marketing and sales, finance, and leadership are essential. Some of the challenges in each of those categories are very tough. The challenge of uncovering and addressing unmet authentic demand is equally tough and at least as essential, but receives almost no direct attention.

Innovators often think in terms of “value proposition” or “solving customers’ problems” or “product/market fit.” But these things are actually just proxies for authentic demand. The hope is that if you create a thing of value, others will authentically demand it, or that if you solve other people’s problems, they’ll demand your solutions, or that if you make something that fits into people’s lives, the product and the market will come together like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

None of these proxies really get at the nature of authentic demand, so they can easily lead innovators astray. Value propositions are based on the assumption that if people value something for themselves—that is, they want it—they’ll buy it. But the world is full of things people want and don’t buy. Think for a moment of all the things you might tell yourself you want but never buy. The famous saying “If you build a better mousetrap, they will come” is, sadly, rarely true.

In the same way, solving people’s problems is no guarantee that they’ll buy. People are often happy to talk about their problems. Entrepreneurs sometimes come to us and vividly recount how a prospective customer cornered them and talked passionately about his problems. In their minds, the conversation validated the features they were planning to include in their product, as a way to solve all those problems. Now if that product were to succeed in the market and we looked back at it in retrospect, we’d probably make sense out of the situation by recounting the customer’s problems and describing how the product solved them. But just as likely, the product would fail. And in that case it would be equally easy to make sense of the failure, this time highlighting aspects of the product and the market that did not match up. Every situation includes huge amounts of data that can easily be collected into a pattern or narrative to rationalize the result. Without an understanding of authentic demand, product/market fit is indistinguishable from prior hopes or post hoc rationalizations.

Not every innovator is stuck when it comes to authentic demand. Some luck into it, some have seemingly unerring instincts, others manage to persist and grope their way to it. But many more are like Paul Simon—they’re stuck in the sense that everywhere they go, everything they do, leads them to where they don’t want to be.

The test is simple: Do you have more demand than you can meet? If you do, then your problems and challenges lie in other areas. If not, Deliberate Innovation can help you uncover authentic demand.