Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Interpretation
Innovative ideas are often dismissed not for their value but for the emotions they evoke in others.
Scott Berkun emphasizes that when presenting innovative ideas, it's crucial to consider the emotional responses of others. Innovations can be technically sound yet still face rejection if they fail to resonate with people or acknowledge their feelings and perspectives, which can lead to failure in implementation. Understanding and addressing emotional aspects is as important as the practical merits of an idea.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing a new product, this quote can be used to stress the importance of customer feedback.
There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.
Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.
Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies - in the minds of those closest to the work.
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