How to Fall Out of Love With Your Own Idea by Mirkka Lansisalo

In this talk from MTP Engage Hamburg I look at how we can become blinded to the faults of our own ideas, and how a collaborative organization culture can help to overcome this.

A desire to change the world can be a key driver of success for entrepreneurs and startups, but sometimes it also has the power to cloud your judgment. When you focus on leading digital transformation, there’s a chance you may accidentally miss or forget something essential. You can end up loving your idea more than the customer problem you should be solving.

Rejection can get under your skin. This doesn’t only apply to job searches and dating, but also to feedback on your idea – more so if you’re already deeply in love with it. But we need to learn to embrace rejection until we get the green light, because we it means we can end up with something amazing instead of average.

How can you avoid being blinkered about rejection? It’s all about learning to fall out of love with your idea, and instead focusing on the problem worth solving. It means repeating the continuous cycle of build-measure-learn. But it is not only being lean, agile, or customer centric – because to thrive, companies need a new culture that empowers people to collaborate and move away from silos, experiment, take responsibility for results, and co-create with customers.

Organization culture must be transformed to become truly innovative and able to meet ever-changing customer needs. To survive in the digital era organizations need to understand their changing environment, innovate, and at the same time challenge their ideas and assumptions, until they finally get the green light.

So remember:

• Embrace rejection
• Get out of the building
• Discover, define, ideate, prototype and test
• Put the people at the heart of the experience
• Don’t stop until you get the green light!