Your business has an immune system that's killing great ideas

There's a type of business that has an immune system, treating new ideas the same way that our bodies would deal with a virus. Bear with me on this, right? Let me explain. So something gets proposed in the business, but before anyone gets a chance to evaluate whether it'll work, the organizational antibodies kick in. We're inundated with requests for projections that can't exist yet, or data about benchmarks that compare this against the current way of doing things. Within these kinds of businesses, ideas don't so much as get killed as they get studied and pulled apart to the point where there's pretty much nothing left. The funny part is that nobody in the room thinks that they're being obstructive. Every person asks for concrete answers to compare against the status quo believes that they're being responsible, that they're protecting the business, they're, you know, doing due diligence for the benefit of the organization. If you look at things from within the logic of their own department, you'd probably agree with them. I mean, after all, the finance department needs to model the return, right? Operations needs to understand what changes, and so on. These concerns seem and are perfectly legitimate when looked at upon in isolation, but the problem is they don't exist in isolation. They compound. By the time an idea has survived the assassination of every department's version of responsible skepticism, the window is often closed, and the person who originally proposed it has lost all enthusiasm. Or, you know, usually a combination of the two. We've built organizations where the cost of trying something new is so high in terms of internal effort that only the most obvious, lowest-risk ideas ever make it through, which by definition means we're filtering out anything that could create a meaningful shift. There's a behavioral science concept worth mentioning here which was written about and tested extensively by Daniel Kahneman. The father of behavioral science, uh, and this particular concept is known as loss aversion. What it means is that people consistently overweight the potential for loss relative to the potential for gain. We feel losses twice as intensely as an equivalent gain. Losing $20 in the street feels twice as bad as finding $20 in the street. This is just how our brains are wired. But when that wiring becomes embedded in organizational decision-making, it creates a systemic bias towards inaction. Doing nothing feels safer than doing something that might not work, even when doing nothing carries its own risks that we conveniently choose to ignore. And the risks we're talking about can be substantial. Markets don't stand still while we're having another meeting about having another meeting. Right? While we're sitting around, our competitors are getting on with things, and buyers' expectations are shifting. The status quo that everybody works so hard to protect is becoming less viable. But because the decline is so gradual and it's over an extended period of time, nobody in the business is sounding the alarm. We're not losing any ground in a dramatic boardroom crisis type of way. We're losing it slowly and slowly enough that each quarterly review looks thereabouts roughly acceptable. This is why me calling it a business immune system gets interesting, because immune systems don't just protect against threats, they also reject transplants, right? When, when, when they're transplanting a perfectly healthy liver or kidney that could save the patient right? The organs can get attacked by the body's immune system because it can't distinguish between something dangerous and something familiar, which is exactly what happens in operationally focused businesses. The response to a new initiative or idea isn't proportional to the risk it carries, it's proportional to how different it looks from what's already familiar or already exists. So if someone proposes a modest improvement on an existing process, it sails through the approval process because it's something we already understand. But if someone comes up with a fundamentally different approach to a market opportunity, for instance, it gets interrogated into the ground regardless of its potential because nobody has a mental model for evaluating it and, more importantly, comparing it. So we end up in a situation where the only ideas that survive are the ones that didn't need to exist in the first place because they barely change what we were doing in the first place. The cultural response to an idea within an organisation often matters more than the idea itself. Resistance isn't neutral. It actively degrades the conditions under which anything new could succeed. Since much of what makes something work is the organizational energy behind it, right? A concept that gets championed by people who believe in it gets iterated upon. It gets adapted when the first version doesn't quite work, doesn't land, and it's given the kind of patient attention that allows it to find its footing where it can grow and deliver benefit. Now, in contrast, the concept that gets reluctantly approved after months and months of internal negotiation, finally launches with the organisational equivalent of a shrug, and then when it underperforms because nobody was really behind it to give it the TLC it needed, everybody nods knowingly as if they all knew the outcome was inevitable. Which, you know, given the conditions, it probably was. Now the opposite case is just as true, and equally underappreciated. Businesses where people feel rewarded for exploring, where proposing something unconventional doesn't carry career risk, tend to generate a kind of momentum that feeds on itself. Conviction generates follow-through, which generates iteration, which produces the adjustments that turn a decent concept into something commercially tangible. The belief that something could work becomes part of the reason it does work, because it sustains the effort required to get through the inevitable rough patches that every new initiative encounters. Now, just to clarify, I'm not saying that we should be greenlighting every idea that walks through the door without having any scrutiny, but there's a vast difference between evaluating ideas constructively and subjecting them to a process designed, whether intentionally or not, to exhaust them out of existence. Many businesses don't realize which one they're running because the process feels the same from the inside. It all looks like diligence. But if you step back and look honestly at, say, the last 5 years of internal proposals that got shelved, I'm guessing that most of them weren't rejected with a clear no for everyone involved. They died waiting for a business case that could never be definitive because the whole point of the idea was that it was new. It disappeared because the person proposing it eventually realized the political cost of pushing it further just simply wasn't worth the effort. So they moved on and just stopped, stopped suggesting things. That's the part that rarely shows up in any kind of forensic analysis. We don't just lose this idea, we lose the willingness of people to propose the next one. The immune system doesn't just kill this virus, it teaches the rest of the body not to bother. We keep looking for better ideas when we might have a better ideas problem, which is actually a beliefs problem. Most of us will never know which one we have because the symptoms look identical when we look at them from the inside. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com, that's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.