FOMO > FOGO

I remember the first time I met Roger Martin. We were both delivering "keynote addresses" to a gathering of hundreds of business leaders at a conference in Philadelphia. He was so smart! Had so many great things to say! No wonder he was the headliner!

When I got up on stage, the only way I could describe how we could possibly fit together on the same billing was to use a rough football analogy: he was like John Madden, an expert breaking down the plays in perfect detail, predicting how things would unfold, drawing on a vast understanding of the technicalities and history of the sport. I, on the other hand, was like the high school two-a-days coach: "I’m gonna get you to do a lot of push-ups..."

He said something I’d never forget: "In business, we love to make empirical decisions based on deductive proof. And the challenge with innovation is that it’s impossible to a-priori prove the value of a new idea." By its very nature, it's new. No data. He continued, "What’s magical about design is that designers create data through prototyping, which enables them to make deductive decisions."

The challenge of new ideas is fundamentally a challenge of information. What do most teams do in the face of insufficient information? They resolve to "have another meeting."

But without new information, you're not going to have a new conversation. Not to say that I don't value "sleeping on it," which I do... but still. Without new information, the next meeting will feature the same conversation.

Here's where design comes in: the best way to create new information is through the kind of rapid, low-cost experimentation that we espouse in design. (notes on "experimental hygiene," which is important to ensure high-quality data creation, here)

I'm just realizing that I haven't mentioned "FOMO" or "FOGO" yet, but am approaching my self-imposed time limit... so that'll have to wait...

But the simple meeting hack I'm recommending goes like this: whenever you find your team resolving to "discuss this again later," make sure there's clarity about what data you need to have a different conversation, and commission scrappy experiments to create that data in the meantime.

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