You know that asking questions is essential.  After all, when you’re innovating, you’re doing something new, which means you’re learning, and the best way to learn is by asking questions.  You also know that asking genuine questions, rather than rhetorical or weaponized ones, is critical to building a culture of curiosity, exploration, and smart risk-taking.  But did you know that making a small change to a single question can radically change everything for your innovation strategy, process, and portfolio?

What is your hypothesis?

Before Lean Startup, there was Discovery-Driven Planning.  This approach, first proposed by Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath and Wharton School professor Ian MacMillan in their 1995 HBR article, outlines a “planning” approach that acknowledges and embraces assumptions (instead of pretending that they’re facts) and relentlessly tests them to uncover new data and inform and update the plan.

It’s the scientific method applied to business.

How confident are you?

However, not all assumptions or hypotheses are created equal.  This was the assertion in the 2010 HBR article “Beating the Odds When You Launch a New Venture.”  Using examples from Netflix, Johnson & Johnson, and a host of other large enterprises and scrappy startups, the authors encourage innovators to ask two questions about their assumptions:

1. How confident am I that this assumption is true?
2. What is the (negative) impact on the idea if the assumption is false?

By asking these two questions of every assumption, the innovator sorts assumptions into three categories:

1. Deal Killers: Assumptions that, if left untested, threaten the idea’s entire existence
2. Path-dependent risks: Assumptions that impact the strategic underpinnings of the idea and cost significant time and money to resolve
3. High ROI risks: Assumptions that can be quickly and easily tested but don’t have a significant impact on the idea’s strategy or viability

However, human beings have a long and inglorious history of overconfidence.  This well-established bias in which our confidence in our judgment exceeds the objective (data-based) accuracy of those judgments resulted in disasters like Chernobyl, the sinking of the Titanic, the explosions of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Discovery, and the Titan submersible explosion.

Let’s not add your innovation to that list.

How much of your money are you willing to bet?

For years, I’ve worked with executives and their teams to adopt Discovery-Driven Planning and focus their earliest efforts on testing Deal Killer assumptions. I was always struck by how confident everyone was and rather dubious when they reported that they had no Deal Killer assumptions.

So, I changed the question.

Instead of asking how confident they were, I asked how much they would bet. Then I made it personal—high confidence meant you were willing to bet your annual income, medium confidence meant dinner for the team at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and low confidence meant a cup of coffee.

Suddenly, people weren’t quite so confident, and there were A LOT of Deal Killers to test.

Make it personal

It’s easy to become complacent in companies.  You don’t get paid more if you come in under budget, and you don’t get fired if you overspend.  Your budget is a rounding error in the context of all the money available to the company.  And your signing authority is probably a rounding error on the rounding error that is your budget.  So why worry about ten grand here and a hundred grand there?

Because neither you, your team, nor your innovation efforts have the luxury of complacency.

Innovation is always under scrutiny.  People expect you to generate results with a fraction of the resources in record time.  If you don’t, you, your team, and your budget are the first to be cut.

The business of innovation is personal.  Treat it that way. 

How much of your time, money, and reputation are you willing to risk?  What do you need your team to risk in terms of their time, money, and professional aspirations?  How much time, money, and reputation are your stakeholders willing to risk?

The answers change everything.