I recently attended a great event. A marketing company offered $3,000 to the start-up with the best idea – an idea they had only 3 minutes to explain. This was a competition for companies looking for angel or venture funding.
As the dozen companies put out their ideas, which ones do you think the 100+ event attendees most backed? Quite simply, they were the ideas that allowed the audience to imagine doing something currently well known better, faster and cheaper. The audience members had a fast, positive, visceral favorable reaction to the ideas that Defended & Extended existing behavior. When it came to thinking about giving away money, they were most ready to support an idea that took the least effort to develop.
The fact is that upon further discussion, the Defend & Extend ideas looked to have a fairly short half-life. Many of the other ideas showed greater long-term value, but they would require finding early angel customers, and white space to actually test the idea and develop a valid implementation. Many audience members could not see past the development problems, and were unwilling to fund White Space for these ideas to possibly flourish.
We all are susceptible to More, Better, Faster. We all have our Lock-ins, and we quickly recognize and accept things which Defend & Extend existing behavior. If we don’t Disrupt ourselves, we’ll never really think about new solutions – and never grow the way we all can. And we’re very susceptible to favoring ideas we see as easy – rather than the ones with greatest potential value.