What’s YOUR Because?
Give us your
Give us your
Because.
Three lines. We will pull it apart ourselves and email you what we think. Most do not survive. Yours probably will not either.
Three lines. We will pull it apart ourselves and email you what we think. Most do not survive. Yours probably will not either.
Science
Hypothesis → apparatus → method → result → conclusion
Innovation
Decide the idea is brilliant → filter the evidence → build it → then ask whether anyone wanted it
Eighty to ninety per cent of executives call innovation a top priority. Six per cent are satisfied with what they get.
An idea is not a thought. It is a solution with a story attached and a dozen assumptions hidden inside it. Your ego owns it within seconds.
Becky pictures a small patterned cup.
Bill wants something slim enough for a car cup-holder.
Steff wants a handle that will not burn her fingers.
Harry drinks slowly and wants it still hot at the end.
The same word. Four different needs. Nobody notices, because ideas do not push back. The paradigm in which we innovate is defined by ideas and ideas kill innovation.
Always a solution
An idea answers something
nobody asked, so there is
nothing to test.
So we go back and ask a
Question
A bundle of assumptions
A dozen claims welded
together, so no single
one can be checked.
So we abstract variables to run an
Experiment
Never expires
It just sits there being
defended, so nothing
ever closes.
So we force a
Decision
Cholera was killing Londoners and everyone blamed bad air. Bad air cannot be tested, so nothing could be done about it.
John Snow hypothesised that the cause was in the water instead. That could be tested. He mapped every death, and they clustered around one pump on Broad Street.
He took the handle off the pump. The deaths stopped.
The behaviour that makes someone want it. Not the challenge they face — the reason they care.
The customer that behaviour applies to. Specific enough for the team to argue about.
The feature that answers it. Not what the product is — how the need is met.
BecauseCabs always lie about where my taxi is: “he’s just round the corner, luv”
SomeoneMolly
WillValue a taxi app that shows on a map where the cab she booked actually is
Ask a team for a hypothesis and almost all of them reach for the same opening: We believe that…
We believethat busy parents will value a weekly box of healthy meals delivered to the door
It sounds like science and it is not. The We Believers start with the idea they walked in holding and put it in a lab coat. There is no behaviour in it, and nothing that can come back false.
The garden needs mowing. That is a task, not a Because.
I hate mowing. That is a mood, not a Because.
I get hay fever every time I mow. That is a Because.
More than one of anything and you have two hypotheses.
Split them. Do not argue them.
If the Because runs past a line or two, it is wrong.
If you cannot write the Because without sneaking the solution back in, stop. You’re polishing an idea.
It is not. Every extra clause must also be true. It does not make the hypothesis richer. It makes it more fragile.
Nasty, snarky, facetious. If it still holds up there is something there. If not, you just saved yourself a few months of pain.
“Because it is hard to know how much I can afford…”
That is a budgeting app, and the few people who genuinely care already use Excel. Before you test anything, check there is a gap between the need and what already exists.
Smart Appliances: real-time energy data on every device in the house. Interesting, and nobody changed a thing. Data did not lead to motivation.
Hypotheses are read aloud, pulled apart and either sharpened into something testable or respectfully dumped. Mornings only. Phones handed in.
Debate it for more than five minutes and it becomes a 2.
Talk about anything
long enough and you start believing it.
Challenge the words in the hypothesis, not the person who wrote them.
A one-page website that sells the thing as if it already exists. The same rig every time, so the only thing that changes is the hypothesis.
Clicks and sign-ups are useful. Card details are definitive.
You want strangers,
not supporters.
The kill goes on the wall with the reason written out.
Killing everything in week one is good news.
Finding more than two or three candidates a week means you are being too soft.
One week of setup, four of delivery and one to wrap.
It is not agile. It is a
schedule.
Understanding this takes an afternoon. Fifteen years of workshops taught us that nobody does it anyway — not because they disagreed, but because the ego fights back.