Maybe You Don't Need a New Idea

I was working through a strategy with a client this week, and one small piece of it had me stuck. We were talking about ways to keep more businesses in the community, and as I worked through the possibilities, I kept rejecting my own ideas. That's been done. They've tried that. We need something new.

So I kept looking. I went through different approaches, tried different angles, and kept searching for something fresh enough to feel like we were actually bringing a new idea to the table.

Then I played pickleball.

It was a hard-fought game, which naturally required an ice cream cone afterward. While I was sitting there eating it, I looked across the street at a business that had recently gone through a successful transition and realized I was staring at exactly the kind of outcome we'd been talking about.

The funny part was how it happened. There wasn't some brilliant new program behind it or a strategy nobody had thought of before. It was good old-fashioned networking. People knew people. Conversations happened. Someone knew there was an opportunity, someone else knew someone who might be a fit, and the right connections existed when they needed to exist.

It was about as unoriginal as a business strategy can get.

And it worked.

New Ideas Have an Unfair Advantage

Sitting there, I realized I'd been holding the old ideas to a standard I wasn't applying to the new ones.

If we've tried something before and it didn't work, we have evidence against it. We remember the event nobody showed up to, the referral push that fizzled out, or the partnership that never went anywhere. The idea comes with baggage because we've seen what can go wrong.

A new idea doesn't have any of that. It hasn't failed yet, so it gets to exist entirely as potential. We imagine executing it well and picture the result we're hoping for without having any disappointing history attached to it.

That's an unfair comparison. We're judging the messy reality of something we've actually tried against the perfect possibility of something we haven't.

Of course the new thing looks better.

What Does "We Tried That" Actually Mean?

There are plenty of good reasons to stop doing something that isn't working. I'm certainly not suggesting we keep repeating bad ideas simply because they've been around a long time. But I do think we tried that deserves a little more scrutiny than we usually give it.

What did we actually try? Did we give the idea a real shot, or did we do it twice and move on? Did the strategy fail, or was the execution mediocre? Did we stick with it long enough to know? Did it reach the right people? Did circumstances get in the way? Or maybe it worked reasonably well, but not as quickly or dramatically as we'd hoped, so we went looking for something that promised more.

Those questions matter because most of the things we know work in business aren't particularly novel. Relationships work. Referrals work. Following up works. Being useful to people works. Having a reputation for doing good work works. Making it easy for customers to understand what you do works.

We've known these things forever, and their familiarity doesn't make them obsolete.

Tried and True Still Requires Trying

I'm all for experimenting. New technology creates new opportunities, markets change, customers change, and sometimes an old approach really has run its course. Somebody willing to try something different can absolutely find a better way.

The mistake is assuming different automatically means better.

Sometimes the next move isn't another brainstorming session. It's going back to the boring idea everyone already knows about and asking whether you've actually done it well enough, consistently enough, and long enough to judge it fairly.

Maybe networking didn't fail; maybe you haven't met enough people yet. Maybe referrals aren't ineffective; maybe you've never built a real process for asking for them. Maybe following up doesn't "not work"; maybe you followed up once and expected an answer.

There's a difference between a strategy that doesn't work and a strategy that hasn't worked yet. Figuring out which one you're dealing with might be more valuable than coming up with another new idea.

I probably could have figured all of this out sitting at my desk.

But apparently I needed pickleball and an ice cream cone.