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.
Innovation comes ultimately from a diversity of perspectives. So when you combine ideas from different industries or different cultures, that's when you have the best sense of developing groundbreaking ideas.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.
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