What Stinks?

One of the highlights of Jerry Seinfeld's fascinating conversation with Tim Ferriss was the simple observation of where great ideas come from. In it, Seinfeld speculates that the source of his comedy is his highly sensitive nature. Referencing his fabulous interview in HBR, he mentions the key to many comedic (and conceptual) breakthroughs is simply answering the question, “What am I really sick of?”

There are many variants to this question. One of my favorites is from my friends at PreHype, “It really stinks that...”

Not only is this question the source of comedic gold, it’s also a fabulously simple prompt to provoke the imagination and stimulate creativity. And not only at the outset of a company; one can imagine the folks at Soda Sense launching with a vengeance against those annoying trips to Bed Bath and Beyond, let alone Reed Hastings launching Netflix out of spite for Blockbuster’s late fees. But many firms continue to innovate by solving interesting problems that they experience in the course of operating their normal business (most famously, Amazon’s AWS came from employees solving their own problems, and then essentially externalizing the solution to the world).

Surprisingly, the biggest barrier to this way of working is complacency with the status quo — we just get used to things not being that great, or get satisfied by gripe-fests, rather than making productive use of our irritations. Or we assume it’s someone else’s problem to fix. Why not, instead, cultivate this hyper-sensitivity as a gift, as perhaps a unique untapped asset worth leveraging? Why not burn them as fuel for ideation?

So here’s an easy prompt for the next offsite:

“What are you really sick of? What problems are we experiencing in our lives or our work that we might be uniquely positioned to solve?”

Perhaps a firm’s most valuable unrealized asset class is its insight into things they’re ‘really sick of’ as an organization: chances are, if they’re really sick of them, there are other organizations who are sick of them too.

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