A corporation with a strong focus on innovation was looking to relocate out of Seattle. An internal team was tasked with identifying the ideal cities based on a number of factors: cost of rent, availability of talent, proximity to key suppliers, etc. They narrowed the search down to about five options and, research in hand, presented their findings to the CEO.

The CEO took one look and said, “These are great places. But we’re gonna go to Chicago instead.” 

The internal research pointed to other locations as being a better fit for the company, so why Chicago? Because the CEO was from Chicago. 

You might expect critical decisions, like an organization’s location, to be made based on facts and evidence. Instead, in many cases, they are determined by whimsy—gut feelings, personal opinions, and unexplainable intuitions.

Innovation occurs at the border of the known and unknown, which makes innovators particularly susceptible to whimsy. In innovation, whimsy has become a plague. If you’re not careful to circumvent it, it can infect and wipe out all innovation efforts at your company. 

The Problem with Whimsy

At some point in your life, you’ve probably been told, “Trust your gut.” Instinct and intuition do serve a purpose and can sometimes point us in the right direction. The problem, pure and simple, is that your gut is not always right. 

This is especially true in innovation. Your “gut feelings” are based on the past—a subconscious rendering of your past experiences and knowledge. Innovation, by its very nature, is about the future: new ways of solving problems. Your gut cannot know the right path. It can only make a guess, typically not even an educated one. Too often, that guess turns out to be wrong. 

There is already so much risk involved in innovation. Do not add to it by relying on whimsy.

Innovation is expensive, time-consuming business. So when your guess is wrong, it is costly. Not only do you lose all the time and money invested in the failed innovation project, but you harm every future innovation effort. You become the boy who cried wolf. The next time you have an idea, even if it is a great one, no one will listen, and it won’t get funded. This is how you are punished for being overenthusiastic and overspending without any justification beyond whims.

The Solution: A Process of Rigor

Innovation requires guardrails. You need a rigorous process driven by knowledgeable people. (And you have to actually listen to those knowledgeable people!) 

Without rigor we have slop. Sloppy reasoning, unfounded and untested, places you surely on the road to perdition or at least abject failure. Without rigor, we do not adequately subject our hypotheses to the level of testing to actually “know” something. 

Go ahead and listen to your gut, but recognize that your gut isn’t saying, “Do this.” It’s saying “Investigate this.”

A hypothesis—especially one made by your gut—must be tested for validity and repeatability (reliability). The most important of the two is validity. You must know whether your hypothesis is true and under what conditions is it true. If you test your hypothesis without the proper veridical conditions (without putting it into the most realistic conditions), then you increase the number of outside variables that can give false beliefs that the hypothesis is true when it is not. Without proper mathematical modeling for initial analysis or proper instrumentation on the initial first tests of a physical prototype, you have no science, only conjecture, which will allow for personal bias, wish fulfillment, and sampling error to enter into the decision-making process. 

Rigor does not guarantee success, but it does guarantee knowledge. From knowledge, you can achieve understanding, and with understanding, you can act with wisdom, making decisions based not on whimsy but on evidence.

A Debt to the Truth Is Always Paid Eventually

Lying to yourself—and make no mistake, that is what whimsy is—is a path that inevitably and eventually leads to failure. As the character Valery Legasov says in the HBO series Chernobyl, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” Whether about power plant meltdowns, product development testing, fibs to our bosses, friends, spouses or kids—all lies incur a debt that must be paid. The debt is paid in disappointment, distrust, and a loss of credibility. It is a debt we cannot afford to pay as innovators. Far better to adopt a process of rigor and seek the truth.