Positivity Bias is a curse for the early stages of innovation.
Well, actually, that might be over-stating it.
But it seems like you have to say something dramatic and definitive and potentially divisive (?) to get attention these days.
Nonetheless, the principle holds true.
As humans we are drawn towards the positive, the optimistic, the good.
And we typically push the negative, the distressing, the harmful into the background to make things more psychologically comfortable for ourselves.
It's a deeply ingrained - and highly useful - survival instinct.
See exhibit 1, childbirth.
But in the early stages of innovation, deliberately digging into the dark-side can be highly illuminating and instructive, albeit uncomfortable and awkward. You find the "problems", the real problems - and then (re-)build systems, products, services and experiences that solve for them.
And sure, at initial consideration of many categories, all the surface-level "problems", all the "jobs to be done", all the "pain-points", all the "tensions" and all the "frictions" have already been solved by clever and diligent marketing folk. And I am no fan of Dust-mite marketing..."Did you know there are up to 100m dust-mites living in your mattress?"
But in the labyrinthine complexity of our psychologies and the systems we inhabit, many of our unresolved problems are hidden, unacknowledged, suppressed and bubbling away in our unconscious and the hidden. People can't "say" these problems when asked a direct question by the nice young person leading the focus group. Systems struggle to acknowledge what is really holding them back from the success they desire.
But just because problems are hidden away, that doesn't make them any less powerful or influential over our motivations and behaviours. It's just that we can't point at them precisely and easily, especially when our psychology and the system rewards the opposite.
So next time you're innovating, don't be afraid to go deep (fewer people, for longer) and dark (only possible once you've built some genuine trust, of course.) Don't be afraid to acknowledge the leadership behaviour that actually punishes failure despite the nice words on the wall and on the website.
What's the problem, behind the problem, behind the problem, and one more time, behind the problem?
Because there's usually gold in the shadow, in the uncomfortable truths that govern our behaviour.
Written by me, not AI. But inspired by:
Carl Jung: "What You Resist, Persists."
Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Zen Proverb: "The Obstacle is the Path."
Theodore Roosevelt: "In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood."