Why do good ideas fail?

No one ever made a significant change from just an idea. You made a change from the unsexy part. The work.?

Ideas, innovation or change…whatever you want to call it…can fall into up to 5 buckets as to why they don’t make it through full implementation.?

In our book Peak Performance, we talk a little about this.??

They really fall into one of five categories.??

Timing. People. Technology. Funding. Scalability. (T.P.T.F.S.)

We covered the first three (timing, people and technology) in the book.?

I want to share the rest of them here

Timing.??

Even if you have the perfect idea…if the organization is not ready to listen, it won’t matter.??

Netflix approached Blockbuster at a time where Netflix was in trouble and they wanted to try to get out of the game for $50 million.??

Blockbuster laughed them out of the room (read That Will Never Work).

People.?

To me, this is like baseball.??

Sometimes you have to trade someone out for another player and that move makes magic happen.??

Sometimes, it’s your best player.??

Sometimes, it’s an average player.??

But the shake up makes the team come together more.??

???I know what you’re thinking – this doesn’t mean firing people.?

This means allowing people to move throughout the organization and not feel abandoned by them when they join a different department.

Technology.?

My favorite example of this is the Denver International Airport (DIA), because it is both timing and technology.

If you remember the infamous baggage handling system which Harvard used as a teaching aid in their business school of what not to do.? You understand this well.??

The nightmare baggage system is now being used at several of the largest airports in the world.? The tech at the time, just wasn’t there yet.?

Funding. ?

FUNDING. FUNDING. FUNDING.??

In all of our work environments we have constraints – funding is always one of the biggest.??

It’s why we continue to ask people to make their job better without having to ask for more money.??

This allows smaller but more executable innovations to flourish.?

It also demonstrates ROI before any risk takes place.??

Companies are constantly looking for other people's money to reduce their own risk.??

Scalability.?

Most people and organizations struggle with this one.??

Doing something as a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) is great.??

• MVP is a way to pilot what you are doing.? It helps you build the service or product at its lowest common denominator without a large amount of effort.

But not understanding how to scale it is an entirely different lesson.??

I was put on the spot by the Ballmer Group several years ago about this exact issue and how my training wasn’t scalable.??

They asked me:

• How could we get our training out to everyone, if you are the only trainer???
• Is there a group to train the trainers?
• Don’t you think that makes the training good…but not scalable??

?

So, to practice what we preach – let's go through this exercise with Change Agents Training by answering these questions:?

1. Timing: In 2020, COVID made us move to e-learning.
2. People: Our customers were way more comfortable moving to e-learning during the pandemic and have not pushed it away since.
3. Technology: Zoom, Teams and other platforms allowed for incredible sharing.? Very few times before COVID, could we get a Zoom meeting to work properly.? The tech caught up.
4. Funding: Bootstrap.? Can we build an incredible group of lessons for people to watch at their own pace at a very affordable cost?? Yes, we could. And how much would I have to learn to make this happen? A ton.? Thanks to YouTube and friends this is possible.
5. Scalability: Hundreds, even thousands of people can move through our lessons all at the same time.? All over the world and receive standardized training.?

Now, just because we got these things to line up, doesn’t mean it will take off right away.??

We have to do the unsexy part. The work.?

The part most people do not talk about.? The easy story is “then it took off.”? “Then everything worked.”

The unsexy part, my friends, is the hustle. The grind. The perseverance.? The implementation

The unsexy part is the failures that led to the success. Unsexy is the grit.?

Or as we like to say…“That is the work.”

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Innovation and ideas are the sexy part and everyone wants credit for the idea.?

The implementation is the grind, the hustle, and the work.??

Without the implementation…it will never matter what idea you have.?

Looking to help good ideas succeed in your workplace? Drop me a line here.?

Actions speak louder than words.

Brian Elms

changeagentstraining.com