Strategyzer Webinar: How To Get Senior Leaders Out Of The Building To Test Ideas

Hi everybody. Welcome to another Strategizer webinar session. We'll be starting the broadcast in just about a couple of minutes. In the meantime, as people are filtering in, just want to pose a question to everybody that you can put into the chat box or into the question box on GoToWebinar. Simply what do you hope to learn from today's session? And if you want to, you can also tweet your comments to us on Twitter at Strategizer. And please use the hashtag StrategizerWebinars. We will be beginning Momentari. All right, let's get started. Welcome everybody to another Strategizer webinar session. Today's topic, of course, is how to get senior leaders out of the building to test ideas. I'm your moderator again today. I'm Kathy Gupta. I manage content and community at Strategizer. And your host of course is Strategizer co founder Alex Osterwalder, who is also co author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. Our host today or our guest today, sorry, is Lisa K. Solomon. She is a Wall Street Journal best selling author of Moments of Impact, an educator and coach. At any point throughout the webinar session, if you want to take part in the conversation, by all means you can provide questions to the GoToWebinar questions box. But you can also find us on Twitter rategizer and you can use the StrategizerWebinar hashtag to follow along with the conversation or submit your comments and questions. As always, our blog is full of extra insights, tips and case examples of how companies and organizations around the world use our tools and methodologies to level up on strategy and innovation. And of course, if there are any tools, reference guides or resources that we mention, you can find them for free on our resource library. Just simply visit strategizer.com register and you can get access to over 30 plus different canvases, tools and templates that can help you improve your strategy and innovation. So what I'm going to do now is just hand over the screen to our illustrator, Holger and Alex. While I'm doing that, why don't you take a moment to just let our audience know why we chose this topic today before we jump into the conversation.

Yeah, thanks Cavi. I'm really excited about this topic, how to get senior leaders out of the building to test simply because when you're in a startup environment, there are not enough people to outsource this test. But when you're in a large company and you're maybe A leader managing a business unit or a project anywhere from 1 million, 100 million, 500 million up to a billion or more, you think this is not really the thing you need to spend time on. And there are a lot of obstacles for you to spend time on that. And maybe you'll delegate it to a team or you delegate it to an agency, but that doesn't really work. And there are a couple of reasons that we will get into why it's an issue to not have senior leaders involved, actually getting of the building, talking to customers and learning. We'll get into that. The reason why I'm excited about this is because it can be overcome. And we've seen a couple of projects just recently somewhere where senior leaders got very excited and where we get very good results because we can move fast and we can get stuff done and we can build new growth engines. And this is a very relevant topic to companies successful or companies in crisis around the world. How do we create new growth engines? And getting senior leaders out of the building is a key component to be able to build new growth engines. And unfortunately, that problem is not discussed enough. So I'm very excited that we have Lisa K. Solomon today, a very experienced coach. We've worked together on a couple of projects also to get her to share her experience and how we can actually get this done. Kavi, do you want to take over quickly or do you want to introduce Lisa or how do we proceed?

Nope, go ahead. You guys can just kick off the conversation.

Lisa, so maybe just a quick introduction that you can give us. What do you do? What are you known for? What are the things that you enjoy doing?

Great. Thank you, Alex. It's really a pleasure to be here with everyone today to talk about a topic that is very dear to my heart and central to the work that I've been doing for the last 10 years, which is really helping leaders get comfortable imagining new futures to help them build the skills, the discipline to understand the tools it takes to model the kind of innovation, the kind of growth and discovery orientation we need to help our organizations grow and adapt. I've been doing that for a long time. First, starting with a scenario planning firm, helping executives design conversations about the future to get them in an expansive and generative mode and ready to tackle the ambiguity and discomfort that comes when you're trying to create strategy in an increasingly uncertain, volatile world. For the last six years, I've been teaching innovation as a leadership skill at the California College of Arts MBA in design strategy, and more recently have joined an organization called Singularity to head their transformational practices to help leaders build exponential futures to solve some of our greatest challenges. As you mentioned, along the way I've written about this. I wrote a book called Moments of Impact about designing strategic conversations and have a new book coming out around designing better businesses.

Awesome. And we're going to get to that new book a bit later. What I want to start with is this question. Why do we actually need to get senior leaders involved? Why do we need to get them out of the building? These by definition are very busy people with very important tasks. Of course. Why is this so crucial? Why do we need to get them out of the building? Talking to customers to kickstart this.

It's a great starting question and I really appreciate how you frame this webinar starting with getting senior leaders out of the building. I mean, what's interesting, if you see the number of companies that talk about innovation as a core strategy to how they see their companies growing and taking advantage of these changing and expanding markets, those senior folks don't often model the kind of discovery oriented behaviors that really set the tone and the culture for the organization to get comfortable with the processes and tools we need, like testing, like experimentation. And so what tends to happen is that the very senior executive team creates a strategy that has something about innovation and then they delegate it to people much lower in the organization. And so we have an instant audio and video gap where what they say they care about and what's stated in the mission statement is not at all what they do. And I think the key to staying relevant, the key to being clear about what your company stands for as it relates to creating real value for your customers is knowing those customers intimately. And that's not from reading reports and charts, that's from going out and having live interactions in an ongoing way. Not a one time focus group, but really building in this discipline and constant renewal of of what your customers need from you.

So that's excellent. I really think a lot of people who are listening in can emphasize with that kind of message and then reality gap where the things we communicate are not necessarily done by the people who have power in the company. And that's a very bad symbolic kind of message there. But can you maybe go into a little bit the problem specifically beyond this messaging gap? Why is it a problem that senior leaders delegate this? What are the issues that come from delegating this? How does this prevent us from creating kind of growth engines that we want to do?

Yeah, I think the problem is even more pervasive than we think. What tends to happen, and certainly from the patterns that I've seen, is that senior leaders get very, very excited about their existing strategies. And the more they stay in the building, the more they get biased from confirmation that the work that they're doing is the right work. But it's really from the inside out. It's really about defending what they did or what they have been doing. It really doesn't put them in this discovery mindset, like I said. And that requires that we get out of the building to see exactly what's happening when customers interact with our products, exactly what their pain points are and what actually delivers true value to them. So if senior leaders just stay in the building, listening to their direct reports about what they report up, it's going to be biased. It's going to be biased by good news and it's going to be biased by what they know how to do already. So it really creates this cycle of defensive mode and protection mode versus getting into an intentional process of exploration and experimentation.

Right. I love the way you framed that in our work and in our blog post. We like to call that improve, invent. Senior leaders are comfortable with the business model that they grew up with, if you want, and that they're managing today. And they're probably a lot less comfortable with new things. And one of the things that, and I'm curious what your take on this is, is that what we've seen recently, quite a bit is that while companies know if you take B2B business to business, for example, they know their direct customers pretty well. If they make products for end consumers, they actually don't know them at all. And then when they have to come up with something new, they will really frame it around the intermediary that they might deal with every day. But at the end of the day, you need to create value for the consumer as well. So they're very far removed from, from this consumer, from the reality of the end customer. And then it becomes very hard to design new products, new value propositions and new business models, and they might feel very uncomfortable with doing that. Is that something you see as well?

Absolutely. One of the most important works that I think has come out in the last couple years, I think complements the discovery mindset and customer development discipline that we're now building into how we think about innovation came from an author named Warren Berger, who wrote a book called A More Beautiful Question. And what he says in it is that we need to support the rise of the curious leader and that we need to get leaders more comfortable with asking different kinds of questions. Not, does our product work or not work? But why does it work? And how could we see and imagine serving our customers differently than we do now? And those questions are fundamentally very different ways of looking at where value comes from. I think we need to get into the habit of asking those questions, Taking time out of our schedule to go and observe what our customers are doing and be willing to say, I wonder why they did it that way. And be able to go into a conversation with customers and say, can you explain why you are doing these behaviors this way? Help me understand what it is that would be useful to you. Explain to me what a great day would look like or what would really make your jobs easier, and to truly be curious about it, not be looking to check the box. Yep, we're great. We are doing great, and our product's terrific. But to be in really a land of what may be unknown, which is inherently uncomfortable. I mean, I don't know about you, Alex. I've met a lot of executives. I don't know many of them that would openly say, I really love being uncomfortable. I really love not knowing the answer. So we have to understand that that's just an inherently difficult and vulnerable place to be, particularly if you're the one at the top of the organization where everybody's looking to you for the vision, for the answers.

Right. And it's uncomfortable to admit that you don't know. Right. So let's assume, okay, we have an executive, a senior leader, who actually has this discovery mindset and who wants to do this. I still often hear from people who have that discovery mindset. They say, I can't do this. I don't have time. I don't have this or that. What are the obstacles that you see today that are holding senior leaders back from actually doing this? And how can we overcome that? How can we help these senior leaders actually develop that discovery mindset and then really get out of the building?

Such a great question. We actually have a chapter in moments of impact called overcoming the yeah, buts, as in, yeah, but that would never happen here. So I think it's very important to take a look at what are the obstacles that are holding us back from this? Because it sounds good, and we feel good when we say it, but then we go back to our real jobs, and we look at our calendars, and we say, there's no way I have time for that. You know, it's not really that important. So in some ways, we need to really take the priority of spending time outside of our building very, very seriously. So let me tell you the three that I see most often. The first one is this focus on near term results. Probably the biggest impediment to doing this work is, yeah, but I have to deliver the quarterly results. Yeah, but I have this priority that's due next week. Yeah, but we've already set the goals for this year and this just doesn't fit in there. So we need to think systematically about we would get out of that near term mindset how we would create real incentives for people to go outside of the building. So whether it's some companies, for example, specifically allocating a certain percentage of the time to be free, 20% time to explore, or getting even more granular and creating rewards for the executives that asked the most questions or have the most customer visits. So there's lots of ways that you can build in mechanisms to get people to move from a near term mindset to really thinking longer term. Because discovery tends to take longer, we can move more quickly, but it's a very future orientation versus I just have to execute on my plan. So getting them to build in a future orientation and to be serious about incenting people to do that. The second biggest. Yeah, but that I see is politics. And politics is just a reality in every organization. And I would argue there's no such thing as no politics. It's either good politics, as in we work across disciplines to help each other discover what's possible and what's new versus bad politics, which is, nope, I got to protect my budget, I got to protect my people. You can't have access to my accounts. No, you can't go with me on that sales call. So that comes from a defensive stance. So we have to pay attention to how we're encouraging people to really collaborate on this topic of discovery and experimentation. And the third and probably most important one to lead into, and I think this is, Alex, the work that you've been pioneering and why is so exciting is the fact we've never been taught how to do this. We don't actually understand that this is a discipline, that there are tools to support us. So we say that we want to be innovative, we say we care about growth, but we actually never teach people how to do this and how to do this well. So there's a real capability gap within organizations that I think we're starting to address and there's a lot of work to go.

Can you maybe share an example of a situation in a company where you've seen that pushback, and then they overcame it, and the senior leaders actually did get out of the building without really wanting to do that first. Can you share maybe an example? Do you have one of those?

Absolutely. I mean, recently we've been working with a large materials company, and this notion of going out of the building and getting customer feedback from a discovery orientation, not a sales orientation, was very foreign to them. And so there was interest but nervousness. And one of the most important things we did for them was we broke it down into this discipline. What does a good interview look like? Can we create questions that will allow us to actually listen to our customers and observe without a preordained sales attached to it or an agenda that was about getting closer to our quarterly numbers? So we took the time to break down what are the parts and what are the pieces that would be involved in going out of the building. So number one was identifying what was the goal of this discovery process. Number two was, can we identify questions that would be useful? Number three is, can we identify customers we could actually go to? So that required some internal questioning about who has access to customers and who would be comfortable allowing us to visit them in this capacity. And the last one, Alex, and I think this is so important, is that they gave themselves time to practice asking these questions before going out because they were nervous, and they recognized they were nervous because this was a new skill set to them. So they actually spent a few hours and realized they actually needed to spend a few days practicing what does a good discovery interview look like? And so they worked in triads to actually role play a discovery interview. And then they gave themselves feedback. And so by the time they actually went out to customers, it wasn't a totally new thing for them. It took some of the unnecessary friction and worry out of the process of going out. And once they started to see just how valuable going out of the building was, it was almost like they became addicted. Like, okay, we need to do more of these. How many can we do with these? So I think really scripting the behaviors to get over that first hurdle so that now you can start to report some internal wins around the learning that you're doing because you've pushed yourself to get out of the building. I think that's really important.

That's fascinating. And it must be amazing to see these senior people really trying to acquire this new skill set because they feel uncomfortable. Pretty amazing. Now, that sounds very time consuming that they would do role plays, that they would try to figure out how to do this. Can you give US a rough estimate in that particular example, how much time did they actually spend getting out of the building? Because these are very busy people and they do still need to make sure that the business continues to run, that their factories run, et cetera. Is there kind of a guidance there? What did they invest in terms of time?

It's a great question, Alex, and I think it's really important to try to budget that time into it ahead of time. And I just want to say I think it gets back to your initial question around why do senior leaders need to be involved? Because the reality is it takes a lot of time and you need the air cover of senior leaders. This is where in the very beginning, when you have an executive or ideally the head of the company that says we need to take growth seriously. And in order to do that, we are going to set some real clear goals about what growth looks like and the time it takes and to have that conversation ahead of time. So you don't get into a place where you've allocated not enough time or not enough resources and it ends up half baked or not well supported. And it's yet another idea that's died that might have been absolutely disruptive and really the key to helping your organization get to that next level of growth. It's hard to judge from an actual time perspective, but I would say in these focused sprints where you're really identifying an opportunity to investigate a new growth business model or a new product, you need to allocate probably, I would say at least 50% of your time, you have to be in it. You really have to be living and breathing this discovery process. And it's very hard to do if at the same time you're also managing your day to day work. So that requires that we get creative about how we keep an eye to the future, but also not lose the reality that as you said, the business has to run. So whether we bring in different people to help run the existing business while senior leaders focus on this new business, or we create multifaceted teams that are still able to move nimbly and quickly on this discovery orientation, I think that's for organizations to figure out. But I would say whatever you think you need to budget for this process, add another 25% at least it takes a long time because not only does it take time to go out of the building and to have these interviews and prepare for them, it also takes some time to debrief what you're learning. These interviews tend to be so rich in what we can learn, not Only from the words that our customers say, but how they behave and to check in with other people to say, did you notice that they really got animated when they said this about their job? Oftentimes that's where the real juicy insight comes in, is the behavior that they display, the energy. So I would say taking time to compare notes around what you learned and to marinate on that, that's as important as actually going out and talking to the customers.

Yeah, I think it's a very, very important point. I remember one discussion I had with a senior leader where he was telling us that for every hour of interview that they would do with a real customer, and sometimes customers would get so excited that it would take longer, they would need somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes to prepare that interview and somewhere between 60 minutes and 90 minutes to actually digest it. And they would always go in teams of two where one person would focus on the questioning and the other person would focus on the note taking. So that's a lot of time for senior leaders to do this. In the examples that you've seen, probably just because of the reality of having to manage a business, senior leaders can't do this by themselves. So is there some kind of team composition that you would suggest from what you've seen in the field that works, works well? And how much does actually maybe the business leader do and how much does a team do that supports the business leader? Are there any kind of rules of thumb there or some good practices that you've seen?

That's a great question, Alex. And I think it's one that I encourage everybody that's listening to really think about, because I think we actually, as a practice in a field need to get a deeper understanding on this notion of team composition and who is the right team to put together? I would say again, this tends to be a little bit, bit of an obstacle for teams. They tend to get the group that is sort of on the bench or might have time available versus the absolute right mix of people and approaches and stances towards discovery. A lot of times what I've seen is when an innovation task force, for example, gets anointed, they say, well, we need a cross functional team. And they get sort of two from marketing and two from product and two from engineering and two from compliance to meet on a weekly basis to discuss new ideas. And I would say that ends up looking more like a Noah's ark of collaboration where you don't really know if these are the right people versus getting the hustlers, getting the folks that already Have a foot on the edge that are curious and hungry and eager to push the boundaries around what's possible. To be collaborative means that your job is to support your partner in being successful. And that can take a lot of different shapes and forms. Possibly the most important one is are you willing to absorb incomplete information and advance it in a useful way. So already, if you know that there is someone that actually is much more comfortable in the execution mode or in the defending mode, or is really not going to be a team player when things get very uncertain and perhaps a little bit uncomfortable, that's not the person that you want on the team. I'll also say though, another I think team member that's often overlooked is the sort of critical thinker on the team who is willing to productively critique along the way. I think as much as we get in defending mode, I think the other danger of innovation teams is we get into pompom mode where we're so excited about our ideas that we're not willing to ask ourselves the critical questions around the assumptions. So you actually need a very disciplined thinker who's willing to say what needs to be true for that to happen. How might we create a specific experiment to test that idea? And so the team needs to understand that that critique oriented questioning is not meant to torpedo the idea, but is really a gift, is really a chance to blend that creative orientation we need where we're thinking expansively and we're open to new ideas and the critical thinking piece that allows us to stay grounded in thinking about what needs to be true. The critical assumptions that have to be tested first before you get too far down the path of building it.

So you shared a first example of a company that kind of overcame the difficulties of getting senior leaders out of the building. We discussed one more when we were preparing for this conversation, which I found very intriguing. Maybe you can share that example. Why was this organization so reluctant to actually have people getting out of the building? And what happened to kind of spark that trigger to get them out of the building?

Yeah, sometimes you need to really just take a leap of faith and you need to be provocative and demonstrate, as we said, some of those behaviors in a very visible and public way. And so the example we were talking about, I was part of a two day executive conversation about business model innovation. So how do we reimagine the future of our business? There was a lot of external trends that were suggesting that the current market share that this company was enjoying was not going to be a given, that they really needed to challenge themselves in a variety of scenarios to get them to think more expansively about how they could continue to be profitable. This was a conservative financial services company and they had a history of building everything internally. Everything took five meetings before the meeting. There was a lot of vetting, there was a lot of conservative behavior to make sure that they weren't putting anything forward. Where all of the research had been done. We were discussing a radical new business model that would require this company to partner significantly on an aspect of their business versus build it themselves. And this is a huge pattern I've seen with long standing companies that are used to building everything themselves, not used to partnering. So we challenged them and we said, well, what if you partnered for this particular idea that you're considering? And they said, yes, it's very interesting. We could make a list of all the potential players, we could research that. And I could already tell they were thinking about the five meetings they were going to have before they actually did anything. And my co facilitator at the time said, well, you know, I know a company that's doing just that and I'm going to set up a call between you and the CEO of that company during our lunch break. Is that okay? And this was in front, right? This was in front of the 60 top leaders. I mean, at that point he couldn't say, well, no, I need to research. He had to say, well, yes, okay. So we forced them to be in that exploratory mode. And then after lunch we came back and said, well, what did you learn? I think it was great. It was a shock to their system. I think they were surprised that we pushed them that fast. But I think the most important thing is to then come back and say, look, we're going to honor your contribution by what you learned, not by being right. So by saying, and putting out a currency to say, now tell us what you learned. Also suggested that they had to do that on behalf of everyone that wasn't in the conversation, that wasn't on the call. So I think that was a real sort of, dare I say, moment of impact for them to realize, oh, is this how this works?

Yeah. And I love the way you framed that. Learning versus being right. And the whole idea of getting out of the building and doing customer discovery and testing is about learning. It's not about being right because you actually want to be proven wrong very quickly to throw away bad ideas. So it's a good thing almost to be wrong. So really the emphasis on learning I think is important. Now you mentioned Another thing that I want to dig into just for a second. You said the companies you were mentioning are always very careful and they build stuff and they want to make sure it's perfect. And you just showed the opposite of going very fast and very. Just starting to learn. So can you maybe share a little bit more about the arguments you use when you try to convince companies to go fast? Because customer discovery is about fast and it's about failing fast. Right. And I know that you actually teach that as well to your students. When you talk to senior leaders and you're trying to show them the value of going fast, of not developing any everything to the end, what are the arguments that you use?

It's a great question. And it gets to a point that I often say, if you're going to lead this work, you're going to have to become what I call a currency trader. What I mean by that is that you're going to have to be on the lookout for the different things internally that people care about. So my biggest lever in convincing senior leaders that this has to go fast is to make sure that we're doing our homework around what, what matters to the companies and how we make sure that we are trading value in different ways. For example, if a senior leader says, well, we've said that what we really care about is growing our market, then you can come back and say, well, we believe by going fast we're going to really understand the boundaries of this market faster. So we're going to go after adjacent customers, not our typical customers or, or organizations that we already have a relationship with. But we are going to spend the next two weeks exploring the boundaries of what this market could be by having these kinds of conversations with these customers. So you are already tapping into something that they publicly or have clearly identified as priorities to them. In some ways, what you are doing is you might have to get this learning mentality, this experimenting mentality into the leader's mind and into the consciousness through a Trojan horse. You're leading with the thing that they've identified that they really care about. And then through that, you're saying, okay, well, the mechanism we're going to get there is by going and talking to as many customers as fast as possible so that at the end of this, we're going to be able to help you understand the goal that you've clearly set out for yourself. So that's just one example of being very clear about what, how you can communicate the value to different kinds of people. I mean, another company may say, wow, well, what we really care about is getting known in the press for our innovation and how we think about this. And we say, okay, great. So how could we imagine that this discovery process could help us elevate our profile for the culture and being known for being innovative? So again, as a currency trader, what you're doing is, you know that the way to get there is by discovery, by going out of the building and by really learning what's going to create true value on behalf of the goal that's already been identified.

I really love that because I think in particular people who are passionate about these new methodologies, Lean startup, customer development, et cetera, they sometimes tend to use the jargon more than the language that really resonates with, with leaders in established organizations. And the way you framed it is, well, if you are to use, if you use what they're really concerned about and you show how this going fast and this testing can help with that, you have a much higher success rate of actually getting senior leaders out of the building, getting them to do things very quickly, getting them to test than if you use the jargon that, that we sometimes might get excited about. I really love that framing. Now, one more thing I would like.

Can I just add one more thing? I think as much as we're talking about senior leaders here, I just want to again highlight to the folks that are listening. It's really the salespeople that I tend that really need some conversations to get them comfortable with it. They tend to be both the key to building customer relationships because they're the ones that have been working with customers, and I'm not saying this is universal, but they also tend to be the most protective. So when I talk about current, really think about what's going to get a salesperson comfortable to bring you along in that next call or that next visit. It might be having a conversation to say, hey, look, I know you're worried about us going into a conversation with your customer where we're not selling something, or that we may look weak or vulnerable because we don't have a solution to sell. But can you imagine how much more trust we might build with your customer if we ask them what they really want and we demonstrate that we truly care about helping them be successful. Can you imagine that scenario, what might happen? And so I think really having that conversation ahead of time with the salesperson to reframe that you are not there to make them look bad or stupid, that you're there to make them look like a hero. And that by bringing you on and demonstrating that the company is willing to invest extra resources to invest in their customers, that that demonstrates a commitment that will probably stand out in the customer's.

Yeah, and I think that's a great addition because it just, it makes me think of one of the recent conversations I had with one of the leaders of an innovation team and he was a senior leader of the business unit talking about how important it is to get the salespeople comfortable with this process because at the end of the day, they are the ones who have the access to the customer. And it was interesting because we were discussing how can we actually get tools like the value proposition canvas and the customer discovery process and the interviewing all the way to the salespeople to get them comfortable with this because they're in contact with customers every day. And beyond selling, I think in the modern growth oriented organization it will really be part of their role to also think about future growth engines more proactively than they might be doing this today. And that while they might still be motivated by the commission, at the end of the day, there might be new types of rewards that also get them to participate in future growth and not just the transaction itself. Great that you pointed that out. It's actually a good segue into some of the challenges that these leaders or innovation doers actually face when they get out of the building. What are some of the mistakes you've seen, some of the challenges you've seen that we need to look out for and to avoid?

Great question. I think one is similar to what we've been talking about on this call already, which is not getting the top down support that you need to sort of be on this life raft that's drifting a sea. And by the time you finally get back, the organization has moved in a different direction and you don't have the, the channels to actually share what you've learned. So making sure that you're still staying tethered enough to make sure that you can come back and iterate with the larger organization with at least their buy in. Not everybody needs to be part of the process, but they need to know what you're doing. I think that the other thing that I believe we all need help on is learning not to defend our ideas. What tends to happen is we embark on a discovery process, we come up with an idea that we think is brilliant. And even if it was based on some initial insight that came from listening to customers, from watching them, we fall in love with it and we instantly get into defensive mode. And that could be either internally or externally. So internally, it shows up when we come back and we say, wow, we had this great conversation or series of conversations with our customers. This is what we learned. We think this is a great new approach for us. And you start getting hammered with the logistical questions and the operational questions, like, great, what would that mean for our back end? What would that mean for our supply chain? What would that mean for our current inventory? And then that person all of a sudden gets in defending mode, and then they feel less certain about their idea and more worried that, oh, boy, maybe I shouldn't pursue this at all. Instead of using those questions as more input, in some ways, internal discovery about what needs to be true internally for these ideas to happen. So imagine a scenario where somebody comes back and shares their ideas and they say instead of defending, because that's what we do, we defend. We say, oh, these are fantastic questions. Let me research that and get back to you. Or even better, I hadn't thought about that before. That's a really good point. Can you tell me more about what worries you about.