Ideas Are Wonderful Things.
They help us survey our options and make informed decisions about which next step is the best one for our particular business situation. The scrappy business, in particular, has to be idea-rich in the face of being resource poor.
The truth is, most up-and-coming businesses don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from a lack of ability to execute them all. Every day, you hear ideas from well-meaning colleagues, friends, and family members:
“You should do YouTube advertising.”
“We should set up an Instagram account.”
“I’ve heard we should sponsor the local chamber of commerce.”
“What if we add AI to our product offering?”
They’re not bad ideas. They probably would all help drive the business forward if prioritized and executed correctly.
But that doesn’t mean you should do them all. Or, possibly, any of them.
If you did, there would be a lot of other things not getting done. Things you had already prioritized. Things that are really core to your success. If you’re building a technology product, for example, you want your engineers working on improving the product, not building YouTube landing pages or an email campaign to the members of the Chamber of Commerce.
So, with everyone already over budget and at capacity, and faced with a plethora of exciting new ideas, how do you choose which to pursue and which to put on the shelf until you’ve scaled up?
Where to Start?
There are, of course, plenty of ways to go about deciding which initiatives you want to pursue now versus later. You could look at budget. Or ROI potential. You could simply decide which is your favorite. Or, of course, you could flip a coin. But here’s why none of those methods are in your best interest.
What you really need to consider is, What’s the cost in terms of you and your team’s focus on the existing tasks at hand? How will it impact your ability to execute your most critical business objectives? What will you be sacrificing in order to go down this particular rabbit hole? What are the risks of it becoming something bigger, more unwieldy, or even unattainable once you’ve already committed? Or, to be more to the point, What is the Return on Distraction?
The truth is, something can simultaneously be a great idea and a horrible distraction. I’ve seen it more times in my career than I could possibly count. Ignoring the potential for distraction is a mistake made by CEOs of public companies, marketing directors, solopreneurs and everyone in between, every single day.
It never ends well. Goals missed, budgets overshot, teams demoralized, clients alienated. Truly bad things can happen when you take your eye off the ball.
So, How Do We Avoid this Costly Strategic Error?
The key is to determine where it lands on the scale of (A) positive business impact and (B) severity of distraction, then decide if it’s a worthwhile distraction or whether it can wait. For exercises like these, I always love a good quadrant. Rank the two competing factors from low to high and see where your ideas land.
If we define the “return” in this case as “positive business impact” and we define distraction as “the inability to accomplish other tasks without significant negative consequences,” we can visually plot and analyze our options. Let’s build a model for it, starting with how we can quantify each.
A Model for Analyzing Return on Distraction
We’ve established that return on distraction can be a powerful context for selecting and prioritizing ideas, whether they be marketing tactics, product improvements, or corporate initiatives.
Now, let’s operationalize it. We’re going to create a system where you can judge potential initiatives by return (positive business impact) and distraction (the inability to accomplish other tasks without significant negative consequences).
STEP 1: Quantify the Level of Impact
Ask yourself how vital to the success of the company is the initiative you’re considering? Rate it from 1 to 10, with 10 being “Extremely Impactful” and 1 being “Minimlly Impactful.” Make it relative. If an idea will double or triple your annual recurring revenue, well, that would be a “10.” If you think it might land you an extra client once or twice per year, let’s say that’s a “2” for your particular business. Adjust this to your own particular goals and challenges, of course.
STEP 2: Quantify the Level of Distraction
Similarly, we need to rate the level of distraction from 1-10, with 10 being a debilitating stop to all other business, and 1 being a minor distraction, if any.
To help you get to ground on this, ask yourself and your team, “What would we have to shelve in order to execute this idea?” Which initiative would provide better returns? If you do have to abandon or shelve a project, what is the cost you’ve already incurred on it? What are the chances it never makes it back to an active project?
All of these factors should help you determine the real level of distraction an idea represents.
STEP 3: Plot the Ideas and their Scores on a Quadrant Chart
Let’s build out a quadrant for a visual way to assess each idea individually, and all of your ideas as a whole.
It doesn’t matter if you draw it on a whiteboard, or a piece of paper, or a napkin while at lunch.
It’ll look something like this:
Here, we see an empty quadrant chart representing the positive business impact of the idea (Y axis) and the level of distraction it will take to do correctly (X axis).
Once you’ve assigned the rankings for each idea, plot them on the chart according to the numbers. It should then look something like this:
As you can see, the ideas are now plotted into four distinct zones (quadrants). Now, we simply need to apply some logic to the zones and we’ll be able to focus in on the most beneficial ideas (the ones with the highest impact but the lowest distraction potential).
I’ve labeled the four zones below:
The “Save for Later” Zones:
My advice is to treat these equally. Assuming you’re strapped for resources, the zones with low impact/low distraction and high impact/high distraction are best saved for later. When you scale up and have more resources, the distraction will be minimized even more, and you can pursue these ideas. Even if it’s a small distraction, it’s often not worth pursuing. It’s not scrappy enough. We can do better. Let’s move on.
The No-Fly Zone:
This one is obvious. Ideas that are high on distraction and low on potential impact should be avoided. These will drag you and your team down without giving you much to show for it.
The “Go” Zone:
If you’re an early-stage business, this is where you want to be focusing: Ideas and initiatives that are high-positive-impact but low distraction. In other words, Scrappy. Here is where you embrace the ideas that will help you efficiently build your business. Don’t be shy. Go for it. Well… validate your numbers first, then go for it.
Wrapping It All Up
Visualizing your ideas in this way gives you a great way to make sure you’re acting rationally (hey, good ideas are exciting!) and in ways that best arm yourself and your team to enjoy the best possible results – maybe not the easiest or most fun projects, but the path of greatest advantage.