Relevant BEANs

One of the biggest challenges of this phase of the innovation journey is identifying critical assumptions. Part of why this is so hard is that the human brain does not deal well with uncertainty. We know that when we are doing new things, what we know decreases and what we assume increases. But we typically get the slope of the line wrong. We have false confidence and overestimate what we truly know. And we have what former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously dubbed “unknown unknowns,” or assumptions lurking deep under the surface. Full BEANs that help to surface and address assumptions appear in table 7-1; partial ones appear in table 7-2.

Atlassian

PREMORTEMS

One way that Atlassian, an Australian software company, deals with the hidden assumption problem is by rigorously conducting premortems. The phrase is a play on the term “postmortem,” which is a medical process conducted after a patient dies to identify the cause of death. A premortem is a way to identify potential threats and to take preventative action to de-risk an idea. Before starting a project, teams conducting an Atlassian Premortem use a checklist to probe the ways a project could fail. The process identifies critical assumptions and potential threats so that appropriate preventive actions can be taken to minimize the chances of failure and mitigate any repercussions. Atlassian supports the program with an artifact: a team playbook, available online, that contains more than forty best practices and rituals.² It further nudges behavior with a project-health monitoring tool that uses eight “vital signs” as criteria. Teams are expected to regularly analyze their health and pick relevant plays to address vital signs with issues.

DBS

WRECKOON

Of course, just identifying the most critical assumptions isn’t enough. You have to design and execute experiments to address those assumptions. You have to make decisions based on the data that result from those experiments. Some assumptions get knocked off; other unstated ones emerge. A key challenge is avoiding problems like confirmation bias, where you see the things you want to see and ignore anything that goes against your hopes and expectations, or like the hierarchy effect, where everyone simply aligns with the leader’s opinion. A couple of years ago, DBS wanted to encourage employees to have candid, data-driven discussions about ideas, so it drew inspiration from Netflix’s “chaos monkey,” a tool to nudge developers to make the platform’s movie-streaming infrastructure incredibly stable and robust. The chaos monkey deliberately but seemingly randomly attempts to cause breakdowns, testing the resiliency of Netflix’s infrastructure. Inspired by Netflix, DBS created “chaos raccoon” software, which consciously tries to wreck data centers, and gave it the catchy name “Wreckoon.”³ It became the centerpiece for a BEAN that increased DBS’s ability to be adept in ambiguity. At any meeting reviewing a major initiative, a slide would appear at some point with a simple but powerful checklist of key questions, such as, “What have we forgotten? What is the riskiest assumption? What is the opposing view? What could go wrong?” Ritually asking these questions in somewhat random spots in meetings showed that what were formerly taboo topics were now fair game. Further, building the slide with a Wreckoon avatar and the question list into basic presentation templates nudged leaders to pick a space in these meetings to pause and ask for dissenting views, challenges, and objections. Leaders were coached to seek out the views of quieter participants, as well, rather than use the space to reinforce their own opinions.

Supercell

CHEERS TO FAILURE

Finally, being adept in ambiguity means recognizing that not every idea is going to work out and that that’s okay. A small but growing number of companies visibly celebrate failure to destigmatize it. Finnish mobile gaming company Supercell was founded in 2010, valued at $3 billion three years later and sold to Chinese giant TenCent in 2016 for $8.6 billion. At Supercell, success is celebrated with beer, and failure with champagne. The Cheers to Failure champagne celebration is memorialized with artifacts like pictures and stories on Supercell’s website, which nicely summarizes the organization’s thoughts on the topic:⁴

We’d like to think that every failure is a unique opportunity to learn, and every lesson will ultimately make us better at what we do. That’s why we have a tradition of celebrating these lessons by drinking champagne every time we screw up. For us, it’s clear that releasing hit games means having to take big risks. And by definition, taking those risks means that you’ll fail more often than you’ll succeed. So whenever we realize that we haven’t failed in a while, it’s a sign that we haven’t taken enough risks. And that is truly the biggest possible risk for a creative company like ours.

This champagne ritual signals that failure is acceptable while also ensuring that teams know it’s time to move onto the next project, allowing them to shift their focus to better ideas. For example, after a year of development and investment, the company decided to scupper a multiplatform approach that fell short of its development targets. In this case, that team went onto develop the massively successful Clash of Clans game.

Partial BEANs

Imagine you wanted to build a monkey to stand on a ten-foot-tall pedestal and recite passages from Shakespeare. What should you do first? Your instinct might be to start building the pedestal to demonstrate progress, but the #MonkeyFirst BEAN from Google X (where Google incubates new “moonshot” ideas) encourages employees to tackle the hardest problem first. After all, you can be pretty certain that you can build a pedestal; training the monkey to talk, however, is a much bigger challenge, so it should be addressed first. The following example demonstrates why this is important: one team was working on a way to turn seawater into economically friendly fuel. The “monkey” for this team was the economics of the fuel-conversion process, which they tackled first. The team concluded that the odds of the project being economically viable within five years were very low, so they decided to kill the project.

The next two BEANs are ways to encourage teams to make a habit of not overthinking ideas. At Innocent, a beverage company 90 percent owned by The Coca-Cola Company, teams are encouraged to Just Go with It. That is, if they are 70 percent certain about an idea, they are encouraged to actively test it rather than to keep discussing it with management.

Similarly, the Live from Day 1 program at Airbnb encourages engineers to push code directly to the website on the first day of their onboarding bootcamp.

BEAN Booster: Psychological Safety

In the 1990s, Amy Edmondson was studying the relationship between the performance levels of medical teams and their reported error rates. Her hypothesis was that high-performing teams would have lower error rates. It turned out the opposite was true: higher-performing teams reported more errors than lower-performing teams. That seemed like a paradox. As Edmondson dug deeper, she realized that the teams didn’t actually make more errors; they just reported more of them. Edmondson concluded this was because higher-performing medical teams were in an environment that was “psychologically safe,” which supported honest conversations, helping them improve and push boundaries. The idea lived at the fringes of academia until a New York Times article in 2016 showed that Google’s research had identified psychological safety as a key enabler of team success. Edmondson, now a long-tenured Harvard Business School professor, released The Fearless Organization in 2018. In 2019 Thinkers50 gave her the Breakthrough idea award, leading her to quip about the irony of winning the award for an idea that is more than twenty years old.

Creating a psychologically safe environment clearly takes work. But we have two suggestions for reasonably simple starting points. First, let’s talk about failure. While the academic literature suggests that almost every commercial success has had a failure somewhere in its lineage, inside most companies, working on something that “fails” carries significant stigma, if not outright career risk. Successful innovation often has a lot of false steps that feel like failures. “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed,” Thomas Edison once said. “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.” So does that mean a psychologically safe environment supports—and, indeed, even encourages—failure? Not exactly.

It depends on the type of failure. When people do something stupid or sloppy or screw up in a way that has negative repercussions—Edmondson calls these preventable failures—they warrant punishment. Can you imagine a doctor performing a routine procedure proudly talking about killing a patient?

A second type of failure is complex failure, where a surprise event leads to an unpredictable outcome in an intertwined system.⁵ “We couldn’t have known or learned about this,” you might say. When these failures happen to you, learn from them, strengthen early-warning systems, and reinforce buffers.

The final type of failure is intelligent failure. Here, the right answer is unknown and unknowable in advance. When this type of failure happens, you think, “This is good. We smartly learned what we couldn’t have known.” The only mistake here is taking too long or spending too much money to figure out that you were wrong. This type, and only this type, of failure should be celebrated.

The word intelligent here requires extra emphasis. For example, Scott once asked a European bank if they had ever had an intelligent failure. “Boy, did we,” said an executive. “We moved fast and launched before we had thought it through or tested it. We bet big. I mean really big. Like, billions of euros. We may or may not have broken the law. When we failed, it almost pulled down the global banking system.” Again, emphasis on the word intelligent.

Edmondson offers a six-point checklist to determine the degree to which a failure truly is intelligent:

1. The opportunity must have had the potential to be material.
2. Assumptions should have been explicitly articulated.
3. There should have been a clear plan to test assumptions.
4. Tests should have been bounded within a reasonable cost and scope.
5. Key risks should have been detailed and mitigated where possible.
6. The failure should have created informative and useful learning.

You also need to build a discipline around measuring different ideas differently. As a metaphor (adapted from Michael Mauboussin’s great book The Success Equation), consider the difference between appraising someone while they are playing roulette as opposed to playing chess or poker. How can you tell whether someone is good at roulette? It feels a bit like a trick question, and it is. There is no such thing as a skilled roulette player, as it is a game of pure luck. If someone is playing a game that looks like roulette in your company, they are taking stupid risks and should be punished, because it will lead to preventable failures. How about chess? What does a good chess player do? Your instinct probably is to look at the player’s ability to think several moves ahead of the opponent. Appraising that capability would require carefully watching someone play. There’s an easier answer, however. Good chess players win. It is a game of almost pure skill. That means you don’t need to watch a chess player play to know how good he is; you simply need to look at his results.

In the relative stability that characterizes most companies’ core businesses, defining and measuring results is a viable way to appraise talent. Poker, blackjack, hitting a baseball, investing in a stock—and, yes, innovation—blend luck and skill. Over long periods, results are a meaningful guide to capabilities, but in the short run, you can get a good outcome by doing the wrong things and a bad one by doing the right things. Here, instead of appraising the results a player gets, Mauboussin urges you to look at the process or behaviors they follow.⁶ That means appraising innovators more on how quickly and efficiently they learn; not on near-term commercial outcomes.

In 2013, Manila Water, a $500 million water utility in the Philippines, built a dedicated team to pursue new growth opportunities. A key lesson it learned is the importance of leaders wearing different “hats.” Here is how former CEO Ferdz dela Cruz described it:

Leaders need to wear two hats. One is for the core business, and the other is for a new venture. The visual of the two hats helps us make sure we are clear what conversation we are having and wear the right hat. Our CFO served as one of the best symbols to the organization on this point. I think we are fortunate that Chito [Manila Water’s CFO at the time], in prior roles, was exposed to ventures. Organizationally the CFO is such a strong symbol of how much risk an organization is willing to take. Some companies have problems because the CFO blocks everything. For us, the CFO is a strong symbol of embracing dual tracks.

One final note. People sometimes mistakenly assume that psychological safety requires treating people with kid gloves or glossing over bad performance. That’s not the case at all. Psychologically safe environments can be brutally tough. Consider Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund founded and led by Ray Dalio. The company is legendarily transparent. All meetings (except for hypersensitive HR discussions) are recorded. People receive real-time feedback in the middle of meetings via an app. Publicly accessible “baseball cards” detail an individual’s skills and development areas.⁷ This environment is certainly not for everyone! But it is psychologically safe. People can constructively disagree, focusing on underlying assumptions versus personal preferences. They can take well-documented, well-thought-out risks and not face punishment if a hypothesis proves wrong.

BEAN Booster: Chameleon Leadership

Today, leaders often hear they have to be like the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, the cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, the basketball god Lebron James, or tennis savants Rafael Nadal and Maria Sharapova. No, that doesn’t mean they need to endure endless practice hours or be blessed with once-in-a generation genetic gifts. Rather, each of these legends has some degree of ambidexterity, which is the ability to use both their left and right hands and feet with dexterity and skill. By analogy, a business leader who is ambidextrous can use her left brain to drill into the details of an Excel spreadsheet when operating her core business and use her right brain to explore the story behind the numbers.

While it is true that leaders increasingly need to learn new skillsets in order to confront different types of challenges, there is a problem with the analogy of ambidexterity. Imagine what would happen if James went onto a cricket pitch or Tendulkar started playing tennis. No doubt they would be better than a layperson, but they wouldn’t be world-class. Put another way, ambidexterity helps them to play their chosen sport better but is insufficient to play a very different sport. Execution and innovation are similarly different games. That means executives need more than a range of skill; they need to follow fundamentally different approaches and embrace different mindsets.

A different metaphor is to think about a chameleon leader who can morph his style and approach based on context. Scott Cook, the founder and chairman of Intuit whose story was described in chapter 6, is a prototypical example of chameleon leadership. Cook certainly has discipline in his DNA. After all, he is a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former consultant at Bain & Co, and a former brand manager at Procter & Gamble (he now sits on P&G’s board). And his software products have brought financial discipline to millions of people. But Cook also recognizes that he needs to think and act differently when advising teams working on innovation projects. In this capacity, he views his role as the “experimenter-in-chief.” He astutely observes that when you innovate, no one knows what the right answer is. And any leader of today’s business often lacks intuition about new and uncertain territory. Therefore, the job of the leader isn’t to make decisions; rather, in Cook’s words, “We teach our leaders that it’s your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.”

It sounds simple, but it isn’t. Leaders simultaneously need to think and act in multiple frames that, at best, appear to be in conflict, and, at worst, appear paradoxical. Running today is about working from the present forward, carefully planning, thoughtfully analyzing, and executing with discipline; creating tomorrow involves intuitively working from the future backward, experimenting, and taking prudent risks.⁸ Longtime Harvard professor Robert Kegan calls the stage of adult development required to deal with this type of challenge self-transforming. In this stage, individuals “can step back from and reflect on the limits of our own ideology or personal authority: see that any one system or self-organization is in some way partial or incomplete; be friendlier toward contradiction and opposites; seek to hold onto multiple systems rather than project all except one onto the other.” Unfortunately, research suggests that no more than 5 percent of high-performing managers have achieved this level of leadership. In a stable era, where success requires disciplined execution, that wouldn’t matter. But in our turbulent era of nonstop disruption, it does.

It’s not surprising that so many leaders lack this capability. After all, most high-performing senior executives developed their skills, intuition, and tacit knowledge in either a today or a tomorrow paradigm, but rarely in both and almost never at the same time. And leadership development (with rare exceptions) hasn’t caught up with this emerging need. To transform themselves, leaders must focus more on mindset, awareness, and inner capacity both to combat basic biases that make decision-making hard in uncertainty and to toggle between different frames. There are no quick fixes here. But research increasingly suggests that the best starting point is to embrace a practice broadly termed “mindfulness.”

To some, that word might sound “squishy” and New Age, but meditation and related practices that use breathing to tune into thoughts and sensations have widely documented health benefits, such as increased energy and decreased stress. For the purposes of this book, it is even more critical to note that mindfulness increases a person’s ability to step back, pause, and become aware of not just her habitual thought patterns but also her emotional reactions. A mindful leader can, for example, “see” her own reactivity, giving her the tools to identify and overcome blinding biases and to consciously toggle between different leadership modes.

Some leaders who have successfully managed transformative change have touted the value of mindfulness. Mark Bertolini, who led US health insurance giant Aetna through a bold transformation that resulted in a merger with CVS Caremark, was an early advocate of advancing meditation programs at his company. Bertolini credits mindfulness for easing the chronic pain he suffered after a ski accident and when recovering from a rare form of cancer. He says it also improves his ability to process information and make sharp strategic decisions. “With so many things going on, whether in a small or large organization, you can get frozen by attempting to process it all instead of being present, listening, and focusing on what really matters,” he said.

Some companies are seeking to consciously create a cadre of chameleon leaders. For example, SAP has trained more than 10,000 employees to use meditation to improve self-perception, regulation of emotions, resilience, and empathy. Participants report double-digit increases in their personal sense of meaning, their ability to focus, their level of mental clarity, and their creative abilities. Johnson & Johnson has long focused on employee well-being. Its recent efforts focus on energy and performance, with a stated goal to help employees obtain “full engagement in work and life.” Participants answer diagnostic questions such as, “Are you present in the moment, focused, and fully aware?” and peer reviewers assess whether “their self-image is keeping them from being the person they wish to be.” Leaders serve as active role models for building these capabilities. CEO Alex Gorsky, for example, has long worn a fitness tracker and speaks publicly about the link between mental well-being and productivity.

Case Study: Satya Refreshes the Code

The first decade of the twenty-first century can charitably be called a lost decade for Microsoft. On January 13, 2000, Steve Ballmer succeeded Bill Gates to become Microsoft’s second chief executive officer. Microsoft’s market capitalization that day stood at about $400 billion. By the last day of the decade, its value had decreased to about $233 billion, a decline of more than 40 percent. One could turn John Doerr’s quip about the emergence of venture capital in the 1980s (“We witnessed [and benefited from] the largest, legal creation of wealth on the planet”) on its head and call it one of the largest legal destructions of wealth on the planet. Microsoft clearly had the technological capability to create the Kindle (Amazon), the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad (Apple), along with search-based advertising (Google). The company’s arrogance never diminished, with Ballmer famously quipping that the Apple iPhone would be nothing more than a niche product while ripping one of the devices out of the hands of an employee who had the temerity to … well, use a good product … and smashing it on the ground. Ballmer would lead an ill-fated effort to accelerate Microsoft’s growth in the mobile phone business by buying Nokia’s mobile phone arm for more than $7 billion in 2013. Eighteen months later, Microsoft took a write-down on that transaction of, well, more than $7 billion, admitting that it purchased something that was, in essence, worthless.

All the while, important changes were quietly taking place in Microsoft’s product portfolio. It moved its core office suite onto the cloud, creating web-delivered models that brought its productivity software to more people in more places on more devices. Its Azure cloud-infrastructure offering established itself as a viable competitor against Amazon’s cloud-computing offering. Its Xbox videogame platform built a strong position in the market, with its Kinect motion sensor providing clear differentiation—and room for expansion into new markets. Investments in technologies like augmented reality, haptic computing, and artificial intelligence continued at pace.

On February 4, 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would become the company’s first non-American-born CEO. The stock market yawned, with Microsoft’s stock down a fraction of a point during the day. Over the next five years, Nadella would lead a stunning transformation that led to Microsoft recapturing its seat as the world’s most valuable company. Its market capitalization on Nadella’s five-year anniversary stood at $810 billion, an almost threefold increase over five years. How did the cerebral, cricket-loving CEO do it? Clearly a lot of the story relates to smart portfolio choices, but Nadella’s efforts to drive what is known in academic circles as the growth mindset played a central role as well.

The growth mindset is an idea detailed by Stanford professor Carol Dweck in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The essence of a growth mindset is a fundamental belief that an individual is capable of learning and developing. Failure to solve a problem isn’t viewed as a character flaw; it is an opportunity to grow and develop. A growth mindset contrasts with a fixed mindset, in which, because an individual perceives his capabilities as fixed, a failure means the lack of a particular capability. Research shows that people with a growth mindset set higher goals, are more comfortable taking risks, have higher levels of motivation and lower levels of stress, form better relationships with colleagues, and achieve increased performance scores. All of this makes it easier to confront ambiguity and to manage the critical third phase of the innovation journey.

Nadella’s wife gave him a copy of Dweck’s book, not to help with his work but to provide support as the couple dealt with ailments afflicting their children. Soon after being named CEO, Nadella spoke at a large gathering of market-facing Microsoft employees in Orlando to describe his view of the power of a growth mindset and its connection to culture:

We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture. And to me that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. In fact, the phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is “growth mindset,” because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude—that mindset—of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.

In essence, Nadella was saying that financial performance was a lagging variable that resulted from pursuing individual growth. “I was not talking bottom-line growth,” Nadella wrote in Hit Refresh. “I was talking about our individual growth. We will grow as a company if everyone, individually, grows in their roles and in their lives.… I had essentially asked employees to identify their innermost passions and to connect them in some way to our new mission and culture.”

Nadella’s view is that exercising a growth mindset entails being “customer-obsessed, diverse, and inclusive” and moving from being a “know-it-all” to being a “learn-it-all.” Sound familiar? Those behaviors overlap closely with the innovative ways of working described in chapter 1. And Nadella doesn’t just talk about these behaviors; he regularly models them: “An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities.” He and his team have created programs to help people live out growth-mindset behaviors, such as an annual hackathon called OneWeek. During OneWeek, everyone can be collocated on Microsoft’s campus to learn, collaborate and, well, grow. More than 10,000 people participated in the first OneWeek, generating more than 3,000 hacks that ranged from ideas to improve supply chains to ways to make computing more accessible to people with disabilities.

Clear, consistent, and simple communication helped cascade this change throughout Microsoft. It started with an important change in Microsoft’s mission—from “A computer on every desktop” to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more.” That revision made it clear that Microsoft ought to bring its productivity tools to as many platforms as it could, doing things that once would seem anathema, such as putting full versions of software on the Apple App store or working closely with Linux, an open-source platform. “I knew that Microsoft needed to regain its soul as the company that makes powerful technology accessible to everyone and every organization—democratizing technology,” Nadella wrote. He and his team put down Microsoft’s (revised) mission, worldview, ambition, and culture on a single page. That approach was highly, dare we say, countercultural, for a company that historically relied on dense PowerPoint presentations to cascade messages. As always, clear communication builds understanding and accelerates change.

“I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture,” Nadella wrote. “As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission.… An organizational culture is not something that can simply unfreeze, change, and then refreeze in an ideal way. It takes deliberate work, and it takes some specific ideas about what the culture should become.”

Nadella recognizes that culture change is necessarily a work in progress. “Because I’ve made culture change at Microsoft such a high priority, people often ask how it’s going. Well, I suppose my response is very Eastern: We’re making great progress, but we should never be done. It’s not a program with a start and end date. It’s a way of being.”

Tool: The Innovator’s Checklist

Through our fieldwork on innovation, we developed a simple checklist we can run through to help guide the innovation journey. Note, the checklist doesn’t say whether an idea is good or bad—it just says whether a team or group is following an approach that maximizes their chances of learning as quickly as possible, regardless of whether their idea is good or bad. Consider the following ten questions:

1. Is innovation development being spearheaded by a small, focused team of people who have relevant experience or are prepared to learn as they go?  No idea succeeds without the right dedicated resources. It is very possible for people to contribute in their spare time, but someone has to be on the hook for making things happen, or they simply won’t.
2. Has the team spent enough time directly with prospective customers to develop a deep understanding of them?  However much time you have spent with customers, it is not enough. Steve Jobs famously said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” He was right. It is yours. Seek to develop an empathetic connection where you know the customer better than they know themselves.
3. In considering novel ways to serve these customers, did the team review developments in other industries and countries?  Remember the legendary artist Pablo Picasso’s maxim: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Someone in the world has probably solved the problem you are trying to address. They might not be in your company, industry, or country, but they are out there. Innovators should live at intersections, getting as much stimuli as possible. Adapting existing solutions to solve a problem is one of the best ways to short-circuit the process of doing something different that creates value.
4. Can the team clearly define the first customer and a path to reaching others?  Good innovators dream big and start small. Be as specific as you can about your very first customer. What is her name? Where does she live? Why is she going to buy your product or service? At the same time, don’t lose sight of what could come next. The more possible paths for expansion, the better!
5. Is the idea’s proposed business model described in detail?  Typically, a lot of things have to come together for innovation success to happen. At a minimum, think about how you will market, distribute, price, produce, supply, sell, support, and profit from your idea. If you aren’t thorough, you are likely to miss something critical.
6. Does the team have a believable hypothesis about how the offering will make money?  Innovation is something different that creates value. If you don’t at least have an idea about how you will create value, you aren’t really innovating.
7. Have team members identified all the things that must be true for this hypothesis to work?  Every idea is partially right and partially wrong. Good innovators clearly separate fact from assumption and seek effective ways to turn unknowns to knowns.
8. Does the team have a plan for testing all those uncertainties, which tackles the most critical ones first?  Does each test have a clear objective, a hypothesis, specific predictions, and a tactical execution plan? Successful innovation always comes from disciplined experimentation. Seek to be scientific as you manage and eliminate the uncertainty that, by necessity, underpins your idea.
9. Are fixed costs low enough to facilitate course corrections?  The only thing you can be sure about is that you will have to make some changes for your idea to succeed. Even if it costs a little more in the short term, keeping costs variable by engaging contractors and using third-party vendors will save heartache in the long run.
10. Has the team demonstrated a bias toward action by rapidly prototyping the idea?  One of the most powerful concepts connected to the so-called lean startup movement is the idea of the minimum viable product (“MVP”)—that is, something that is good enough to solve the customer’s problem without all the bells and whistles behind it. That doesn’t always mean a physical prototype: a mock website, a storyboard that walks you through a new process, or even a skit showing how an idea will work can all serve as vehicles to accelerate learning.

1. 1. Scott’s 2014 book The First Mile deep-dives into this step. The book anchors on two acronyms: DEFT and HOPE. DEFT stands for document, evaluate, focus, and test, and is the core process to help surface and address key strategic uncertainties. HOPE stands for hypothesis, objective, prediction, and execution plan, and it is a reminder about how to experiment with discipline.

2. 2. Other plays include Inclusive Meetings (which harkens back to the MOJO BEAN), Get S#!t Done Day, Disruptive Brainstorming, and Rules of Engagement. The plays are available at https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays.

3. 3. Inter-author debate (or is that intra-author?): One author thought Wreckoon was an obvious combination of wreck and raccoon and therefore didn’t need to be explained. One author thought we needed to do a better job of connecting the dots. If you run into us, tell us what you think!

4. 4. There are also rumors that at the celebration there is a champagne bottle with a blank label to capture key lessons from the failure. If Supercell doesn’t do this, it should!

5. 5. A failure triggered by a so-called black-swan event would be an extreme example of a complex failure.

6. 6. Consider, as a thought experiment, a blackjack player hitting on eighteen while the dealer is showing a six and drawing a three. Yes, they took a risk and it was rewarded, but it was a stupid risk. They got the right outcome, but they followed the wrong process.

7. 7. This is included in our list of BEANs in the appendix. Andy, who is steadfast in his misbegotten notion that cricket is a superior sport to baseball, uses Top Trump cards as a more globally relevant example. After reviewing this footnote, he also noted, “This footnote is scandalous … and I have learnt you cannot add a comment to a footnote, which is weird.”

8. 8. Dual Transformation, Scott’s last book, shorthands those two worlds as Transformation A, where you reinvent today’s business to increase its resilience, and Transformation B, where you create tomorrow’s growth engine.