The Visionary's Lament
“But customers don’t know what they want!"
It’s an anguished cry that I have heard often from startup founders. In a way, I don’t blame them. I’ve been there myself. If we’re not attempting something truly new and innovative – what’s the point? If we’re just going to conduct the world’s biggest focus group to decide what to do, why couldn’t any old idiot do it instead? Isn’t the whole point of devoting our life to this enterprise to show the world that we have a unique and visionary idea?
I remember one conversation with a visionary quite well. He had just come back to the office after a few days away, and he was filled with big news. “I have incredible data to share!” which was pretty unusual – a visionary with data? He carefully explained that he had conducted a number of one-on-one customer interviews, showing them an existing product and then documenting their reactions. His conclusions were well thought out, coherently based in the data he was presenting, and painted an alluring picture of a new way forward. His team almost exploded on the spot.
“That’s the same idea you’ve been pushing for months!” “What were the odds? Customers explained to you that we need to do exactly what you wanted to do anyway? Wow!” It was an ugly scene.
We all know that great companies are headed by great visionaries, right? And don’t some people just have a natural talent for seeing the world the way it might be, and convincing the people around them to believe in it as if it was real?
This talent is called the reality distortion field. It’s an essential attribute of great startup founders. The only problem is that it’s also an attribute of crazy people, sociopaths, and serial killers. The challenge, for people who want to work with and for startups, is learning to tell the difference. Are you following a visionary to a brilliant new future? Or a crazy person off a cliff?
True visionaries spend considerable energy every day trying to maintain the reality distortion field. Try to see it from their point of view – none of the disruptive innovations in history were amenable to simple ROI calculations and standard linear thinking. In order to do something on that scale, you need to get people thinking, believing, and acting outside the box. Their greatest fear is categorically not that their vision is wrong. Their real fear is that the company will give up without ever really trying.
This is where data, focus groups, customer feedback, and collaborative decision-making get their bad rap. In many cases, these activities lead to bad outcomes: watered down vision, premature abandonment, and local maxima.
When visionaries say “but customers don’t know what they want!” they are right. That’s the problem with false dichotomies: each side has a kernel of truth within it. You cannot build a great product simply by obeying what customers say they want. First of all, how do you know which customers to listen to? And what do you do when they say contradictory things?
And yet, the people who resist visionaries also have a point. Isn’t a bit scary, maybe even suicidal, to risk everything on a guess – even if it is emotionally compelling?
Like all false dichotomies, if either side “wins” this argument, the whole enterprise loses. If we just follow the blind mantra of “release early, release often” and then become purely reactive, we’re as likely to be chasing our tail as to be making progress. Similarly, if we pursue our vision without regard to reality, we’re almost guaranteed to get some aspects of it wrong.
The solution is synthesis: to never compromise two essential principles. One, that we always have a vision that is clearly articulated, big enough to matter, and shared by the whole team. Second, that our goal is always to discover which aspects of this vision are grounded in reality, and to adapt those aspects that are not.
A vision is like a sculpture buried in a block of stone. When the excess is chipped away, it will become a work of art. But the challenge in the meantime is to discover which parts are essential, and which are extraneous. The only way to do this is to continuously test the vision against reality and see what happens.
Photo: bernichacra, Flickr.
Operations Executive - Scaling growth - Marketing Operations - GTM - Sales Operations - Partner Operations - Business Operations - Customer Success Operations
11 年You describe an interesting challenge here. How does a visionary approach feedback from potential customers at the early stages of a product. The blessing and curse for visionaries is that they see both needs and solutions where others often do not. They see them sooner with a hightened clarity. They see connections that have not yet been made. At that point the challenge is two fold. How to take a team and early adopters along on that journey and how to get realistic customer feedback that doesn't just reflect the visionary's picture of how the world should be. The effective entrepreneur understands how to separate these two threads. He/she stays steadfast in the principle foundation of the idea, but is secure enough to accept valuable feedback and incorporate it to the idea. As soon as you coopt customer feedback to try and prove your point you've crossed the threshold from visionary to a bit crazy.
Owner at KBrewer Studio
12 年I have been labeled a visionary and am constantly thinking of different ways to approach all that is around me. That is what an artist does - problem solves continually. Now that I am nearing "real" retirement - since my building was sold out from under me - I'd love to interact with medicine, energy conservation and create better designs for everyday items. Just need to figure out how to build a new Medici World where businesses can send in their problems and/or dreams and us "creative thinkers" come up with ideas. Then they pick and choose the ones they like best - for a price of course. And in reference to customers not knowing what what they want - they do. They want the most easy to use 'anything'. Like Steve Jobs said - "think whatever makes life easier".
UX Architect, Futurist Artist, Inventor, & UX Activist
12 年A visionary is someone who understands the problem at a level of abstraction such that when a potential solution appears, he can spot how it might fit the need, even though it isna??t packaged in a box with a label that says, Solution to the problem. Back when the web happened along, I happened to be studying ways to deliver large amounts of maintenance data to airlines online. The problem was complex. Airlines wanted updates immediately; an updated CDROM every 90 days was not sufficient. Large data transmissions were tedious and error prone. All the client reader solutions required that customers buy and install certain hardware and software. When http and the Mosaic browser appeared, I instantly saw in it solutions to many of these problems. Whata??s more, the more I looked at the potential capabilities, the more I saw of possibilities for solving other problems that I had familiarity with. The list seemed to be endless. A colleague chided me saying, To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He was right. And now, after nearly two decades of the World Wide Web, it is plainly evident that everything was in fact, a nail. These days, I have a large box of hammers and like collecting news ones. Some I discover, others I make. Nails come in all shapes and sizes. If you have a good hammer, dona??t be shy. But do study about nails.
Global Leadership Speaker | Futurist | Corporate Trainer | Cutting Edge Distinction is the message.
12 年Great blog, I recently wrote; Visionaries are the leaders of excellence whose enemies are failure,??mediocrity and the comfort zone and for them, a brick wall is an opportunity to knock down and use as platform to see even further. ?? O. Anyado 2012.