Our approach to innovation is dead wrong | Diana Kander | TEDxKC

when I was 17 I was actually into Taekwondo. She was little and had read all these statistics about the likelihood of being attacked as a woman, so I thought learning martial arts would make me feel safe. She was one of the top students in her class; she had a green belt and walked around thinking she was a real badass one night after a night shift at the restaurant where she worked. They attacked me in the back parking lot. One of the customers was very nice to me during my shift. there waiting for me when I came out while I was looking for my keys trying to get into my car, he reached out and grabbed me by the neck, this was the moment I had been training for years and yet my arms were hanging limply on my A On either side my legs didn't move, they felt like they were made of concrete.

I didn't fight. I was in shock at that moment one of my coworkers came out the back door and saw something was

wrong

. He yelled in my general direction and my attacker ran away. I was very lucky that I didn't get hurt that night, but as an analytical person I was also completely confused by not having deployed all my Taekwondo training and handled the situation on my own, so I thought about my classes and how the teacher always paired me up with someone. my size during sparring, usually a 12 year old girl and there were so many things we weren't allowed to do because they were illegal in tournaments, so no punches in the face or kicks on the ground.

In the groin you know all the good things, so I realized that I was really learning how to score points in a very controlled environment within a tournament. I wasn't really learning how to defend myself because I didn't have practice against realistic opponents with realistic skills. attacking movements, so the irony was that the same classes that I thought were teaching me self-defense left me unable to defend myself when it mattered most and there is another educational program that has a very similar massive fatal flaw: it's the way we teach. people to start new businesses and launch new products Since the 1980s, we have had an explosion in the number of classrooms and programs teaching people how to start new businesses and over the same period studies show that there has been a gradual decline in The overall rate of the number of new businesses started in a real increase in the number of businesses that fail and close, so how do we reconcile these two facts?

A simple solution is that we are teaching people the

wrong

thing and it all has to do with how we do it. When you're teaching them how to allocate their time, you see that all of these classes are very similar and they tell you that once you have a great new business idea, the next thing you should do is write a comprehensive business plan, a 30-page document. complete with 5-year financial projections, then you raise investments from friends and family or outside investors, build your product and finally, when all is said and done, customers will run to you with open arms, all according to your plan, people laugh at this in the audience because I think Understand the famous Mike Tyson quote, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, and when you try to predict the future five years in advance in a vacuum , you will get punched in the face, so let me give you an example.

The Marshmallow Challenge is this fascinating exercise that asks teams to build the tallest freestanding structure they can with twenty spaghetti sticks, one meter of rope, one meter of duct tape, and one marshmallow. They have 18 minutes and the marshmallow has to go on top so all different types of groups accept the challenge engineers, architects, business executives, MBAs, even kindergartners, and consistently the MBAs do worse than any other group of participants, so the average structure built is about 20 inches, MBAs average 10, even kindergarteners are kicking their butts building structures two and a half times taller, so how is it possible ?

These are the same people we are training on how to plan and execute the ideas of the future and, again, it all has to do with how we are teaching them to allocate their time so that the NBA Typically, they spend about the first 30 per percent of the challenge to planning the perfect structure by allocating rolls, then 60 percent of their time to building it and finally, with about a minute left, they confidently place the marshmallow on top of the structure just to watch the entire process. thing collapses under the weight of that marshmallow, business students wait until the end of the exercise, when they have already built the entire structure to interact with the most valuable piece of the puzzle, that marshmallow, and they are so confident in their plan that they don't even They leave themselves time to make adjustments, you know, in case they make a mistake, kindergarteners have a totally different

approach

, they start with a small, stable structure with a marshmallow on top, this only takes a few minutes and now they have a lot left. time to experiment they don't think there is a right answer to this puzzle they play to solve it in the same period of time that the NBA builds only one structure kindergarteners can build four or five different structures, that's For me, how are consistently overcoming the lesson of this challenge is that the more you work on your plan in a vacuum, the more likely you are to fail.

In fact, I can attest to this from personal experience because of all the good things Mike said about me. In the introduction he didn't mention my colossal failure. I had a great vision for a software product. I raised almost half a million dollars in outside capital. I cashed in on every favor I had, all because I was so confident in my business plan. It took me months. write it and when we finally launched the product, customers just didn't behave the way we thought they would, we executed a flawed plan perfectly and spent more time planning and building than interacting with our customers to find out if they were really interested in buying and using our product, let me tell you that failure hurts, but not as much as regret, and what I wouldn't give to have a few more chances to launch that product, what if instead of teaching people who have a new idea for a product that they should spend the next three to six months of their lives writing this comprehensive plan to convince everyone, including themselves, that they are right, what if instead we taught them how to spend a month experimenting like those kids from kindergarten and trying some? of their fundamental beliefs about how their customers will behave because human behavior is actually quite difficult to predict, harder than predicting with certainty how a marshmallow will behave some people disagree, they think there is nothing to think about in the world that, of course, customers are going to want to buy this or use this product and for those people I have developed a very fun experiment with my students, so I asked them to go to a public place and give away 5 $1 bills, that's right, They have five chances. to give out free money, but first they have to write a short plan, so who is their target customer, what are they going to say to get their attention and, out of five possibilities, how many dollar bills will they give away, of course, everyone thinks they will. they will do.

Giving away 5 out of 5 is a no-brainer, right, everyone wants free money almost every time they make a mistake, everyone learns it's a no-brainer, but giving away cash is actually a lot harder than they thought. They're busy, some people are skeptical, so they learn that certain groups of people are actually more interested in their idea than others, that certain lines work better than others, and most importantly, that their plan is just one point. starting that as soon as they encounter the real world. They're going to start making adjustments so that they understand the value of having those interactions in the real world as soon as possible.

If we have any chance of reversing these macro trends, we have to stop teaching innovators that they have to be fortunetellers who can see the future. future that is not realistic instead we have to teach them to be detectives, people who use facts and evidence to support their claims about how customers will behave, they think people will rush to buy their product when it is complete, so let's prevent . Cell 20 of them, before we even start production, think they're going to pay 49.95, then let's set up a simple landing page where we see how many people click the Buy button at that price if we want to create real companies that survive longer.

More than just business plan tournaments, we need more than the hope that they will succeed. We need evidence and a reason to believe that the claims they make about their clients are more fact than fiction. Thank you.