(Image from Wadem's Flickr stream.)
A few months ago, I was telling the project backstory for a service that our company helped to conceptualize and design. It's been a big commercial success. The backstory is always so much messier than the marketing story, but you learn much more from it.
Describing the efforts that our client had made once our project had ended, I said "they went big with their launch and made a splash. They went big to win."
The chatter in the room started and a voice called out from the back (it's always from the back): "See. We should be putting more money behind our launches. We have to go big to win."
Whoops. I found myself in the midst of my own messy backstory moment only having shared half the story.
You should go small to learn and big to win.
I think when the goal is to win, yes, you should seriously considering big investments and be relentless. But some initiatives and growth efforts goals aren't really destined "to win", no matter what we tell ourselves as businesspeople.
This is especially true when you're pushing on the boundaries
of what users expect from you, what you know how to do and how you're
set up as an organization. (That is, more revolutionary and evolutionary
outcomes.) In these situations, it comes down to thinking about initiatives as options. How little can we invest to learn the next bit of critical information?
I told another story, this one about the development of ACC Select, that illustrated a different goal (not one of ours). In this case, the goal was to learn if the team could develop a small and profitable offering with the potential to scale.
This is one of the big challenges facing the people in charge of growth at companies. Separating the and identifying the outcomes and processes to pursue different types of growth and innovation goals. But corporate cultures, especially in established distribution-driven businesses, ask for confidence and scale immediately. Anything else is a distraction. But there are some distractions that are worth it. Finding them and pursuing them the right way is the trick.
I'm left wondering about whether and how "small to learn" strategies have to play out. Are they always in the open? And when should they occur discretely?
