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A business school professor shares the mental roadblocks that keep people from innovating.
The “lean startup” playbook for rapidly building and testing new business ideas is so popular that even if you don’t know it by heart, you’re probably still familiar with many of its core ideas: pivoting, failing fast, minimum viable products.
So why, asks Andy Molinsky—a professor of management and organizational behavior at Brandeis University’s International Business School—do aspiring entrepreneurs still get logjammed during product development?
It’s often a failure of psychology, not process, he argues in a new essay for Forbes.
“The playbook only tells you what to do,” explains Molinsky, who’s also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review. “Every step also demands a psychological capability, and most people are missing at least one. They stall at the exact moment they know the next move and can’t bring themselves to make it.
In fact, there are five key mental skills that the business school professor says you need to hone if you want to successfully iterate through ideas, zoom in on the good ones and ultimately develop a winning business.
Have “intellectual humility”
Molinsky argues that entrepreneurs need to be detached enough from their own ideas that they can adapt and pivot when the evidence says those ideas aren’t good enough. As an example, he points to the story of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who realized that users of their app Burbn didn’t care about any of its features except for the photo-sharing software. Their willingness to cut bait and reprioritize is what laid the groundwork for Instagram.
Develop “shame tolerance”
In parallel with intellectual humility, Molinsky highlights the need to launch something early, even when it’s not very good yet. As an example, he nods to a quote from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Perfectionism, after all, can be more of a curse than a blessing, and you can only make your ideas better by opening them up to criticism early and often.
Remember that you are not your projects
Entrepreneurs put their hearts and souls into their work, so it’s not surprising that they often take failure personally. But, Molinsky warns, that can be an impediment to actually getting better. Instead, try “self-distancing,” he suggests: remove your own emotions about failure from the equation, and think about how you would advise someone else to deal with this situation. In other words, don’t worry about what a mistake or problem says about you—just worry about what it means for your work.
Leave your need for “cognitive closure” at the door
Founders love certainty—in fact, most people do—but that’s often not realistic when you’re in the midst of building something that has never existed before. So get comfortable living with ambiguity, the Brandeis business professor encourages, and don’t get hung up on your need for cognitive closure. (This is especially crucial during what Molinsky calls the “long middle” of a development cycle, when you have results but don’t know what they mean or where they’ll lead you next.)
Be willing to pivot. No, really!
Everyone knows that a pivot can be a key step toward building a product or business model with bonafide product/market fit—but that’s easier said than done! After all, perseverance and an unwillingness to give up are also key entrepreneurial instincts. So when navigating this dynamic, Molinsky encourages founders to embrace psychological flexibility, or as he puts it, “caring deeply about the goal while staying flexible about the path.” This framework can help you avoid the sunk-cost fallacy but still dig in when the evidence says you should stay the course.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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