"If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you're playing it safe."-- Woody Allen, Director
You're not taking enough risks in business.
This statement just sounds wrong when you hear it. How can you afford to take anymore risks? Especially in this economy?
Business leaders will drone on and on about 'mitigating risk' to all who can stand to listen to them, but most of the time they just want investors to feel safe or to protect their jobs. Their constituents echo this same tune even though it chains them to cubicle hell.
So how can you afford any more risk? Isn't it funny to know that you'd rule out this risk before even knowing the upside of the reward?
That's the way your brain works - and it can get you in trouble in business if you let it.
Right or left brained?
A productive first step for the creative process is to hunt and gather, to compile the data and fruitful findings of the market landscape. This method of collection is essential to innovation.
Our brains need to be showered with information and then, from the subconscious, many ideas begin to take shape, simply from asking the right questions.
Much has been made of the right and left side of the brain over the years. What little we know, however, is very helpful when studying the creative process.
Nobel laureate Roger Sperry is best known for helping us understand these general applications of the lateralization of brain function.
Sperry concluded, that left brain functions are logical, detail-oriented and facts rule this hemisphere. The dominant functions on the right side of brain are feeling, 'big picture-oriented' and imaginative.
Paralysis by analysis
Innovation is a creative (right-brained) process that is somewhat interrupted whenever data (left-brained) analysis is introduced.
Not surprisingly, innovation requires risk-taking too. Great businesses that have brought innovative products and models to market all took risks in order to do so. To be first in a new product category or to create a whole new industry often means overcoming a fear of failure or of the unknown. How do you quantify that?
The problem with an analytical, data-driven approach to innovation is that if every decision is made through this lens, then no risk would ever be taken.
Paralysis by analysis kicks in and risk turns into a big bad wolf that terrifies the decision-maker into fight-or-flight mode. The 'flight' in this example means sitting on one's hands, not doing anything, to be safe, or worse yet - to develop something simply because it must done and produce a cookie cutter idea that blends in with everything else.
The thinking follows this pattern of rationalization: 'How about we do a frozen yogurt chain? Everyone else is doing them, so there must be a market for them!' No wonder why many businesses feel so obsolete these days.
There are millions, and I mean millions, of current or non-existing business owners who kick themselves every day because they didn't take the same chance that a successful company did even though they had every opportunity to do so. In this example, Sprinkles cupcakes are the frozen yogurt killer. Why? In part, because nobody was doing them.
Many an entrepreneur thought of the same idea that another successful business operates on but were afraid to take the risk or simply spent too much time thinking about it and therefore ended up settling on something safe. Don't be that business.
Tim Andren is the founder of Guideas, Inc. an innovation and marketing company.
