Turning ignorance into innovation

If you don’t know what you’re doing, are you actually more likely to succeed?

If you’ve never done this or that before, aren’t you more likely to ignore the biases that have dictated past execution and instead react to how the market works today, and what’s needed to drive value there in real-time?

If you never studied it in school, are you more likely to respond to what’s happening in front of you, vs. relying on what a textbook taught you years ago?

This economy is creating conditions for rebirth at organizational and individual levels.  That means lots of people and businesses trying things they haven’t done before, that in many cases haven’t been done before.  But rather than assume these innovators don’t know what they’re doing, perhaps we should watch them more closely.

Sure, their work might have a higher margin for error.  But their work is also a real-time laboratory for new ideas, new ways of building products, going to market, attracting customers, engaging loyal fans. 

Plenty of business and marketing leaders around us, executing without experience or biases, are already creating better, more efficient and more successful practices.  We should watch closely, as their work may be the new textbook for what’s working now, and could work in our own businesses in the years to come.