If You Must Crawl Before You Walk Why Do So Few Do It?
It’s a common phrase, “you must crawl before you walk.” We say it because that’s what we see babies do as they mature. We then apply the same logic to businesses and founders. But is the saying true?
Turns out, many babies go from some other type of movement (sliding, rolling etc) and straight into walking. This skipping of the walk phase has become associated in common knowledge with warnings of learning disabilities and undeveloped motor skills. But I cannot find any reasonable research study that shows that babies should crawl before they walk — that is, that they are actually at a disadvantage is they skip crawling.
Turns out in many parts of the world babies are encouraged not to crawl. The ground is not clean, so there are disadvantages to putting your face close by. These babies learn to walk just the same. Is this saying an example of common knowledge which misleads us when we think about development and growth? Or if the babies just don’t want to crawl, how hard should we try to encourage them to do so?
I Recreate Every Time
We tell startups and businesses developing new products to pass through a series of preset steps in their path toward development and growth. Again, largely this works and the intentions are good. But sometimes that preset process is better for the advisor than it is for the business people. Better for the person guiding the work than the person actually doing the work. Or, there are other factors (which all make sense) that prevent the business person from following the preset steps. Sometimes there is just resistance to doing something different. And that is totally normal. Why expect complete trust when past advisors led them astray?
With every business I work with — new startup or established corporation — I recreate a process rather than reapply the exact same things that worked (or were just the “common knowledge”) elsewhere. Every situation is a little different. The timing and place and people are different. So I recreate. This is inherently unscalable and that is fine with me.
Otherwise, the risk is that we fall into what I call the public health policy approach to innovation. Public health policy does make sense in the aggregate but there are also reasons for why you may not want to follow policy if you know your specific situation within the population.
- Policy can set actions that suit the average case within the population. In the health example, this includes when to recommend vaccinations, diet recommendations, intervention for developmental milestones, and more. These broad recommendations are not for you individually, but are generalized for the whole population. In other words, in order to generally satisfy everyone, simplify the recommendations. The result is that everyone will be a little unsatisfied but few should be misled to harmful actions.
- Focus on the high-risk cases within the population and make general policy that reduces their risk. The idea is to prevent the most common big problems through actions. These actions should have little downside for the rest of the population.
Related to business, this would be the recommendation that everyone do customer interviews for example. There is something to be gained, little to be lost, and it might help prevent someone who has spent years in an R&D lab from pursuing the unlikely commercialization of interesting but useless technology.
In other situations I see better results coming out of rapid experimentation — running 100 small tests simultaneously — in order to be open to surprises and to be given the opportunity to double down on what shows early promise. Broadly guided by metrics but also somewhat chaotic in the beginning.
If we have all of this knowledge about how to learn from potential customers, but few people apply it, that’s a problem. Rather than continue to make the same recommendations and be frustrated when there is push-back, time for the advisors to see the world through the eyes of the business.