If you're a busy leader with a good business growth idea who's struggling to get over the starting line, you're not alone. It's a common problem that I help leaders overcome so they can profit faster and at minimal risk.


That's why in today's session, you're going to learn the 4 core areas of uncertainty that prevent you from business innovation and how to identify them front and centre so that you can overcome them and achieve your dream results without stress or worry.

Uncertainties, unknowns, and the uncontrollable are three areas that can unconsciously and subconsciously stop us from innovating.

The solution is simple. Make the 'U' words visible and consciously deal with them.

The more unknowns and uncertainties you can identify, the easier it is to address them and validate to eliminate them. 

Not calling them out means that your limbic brain will suppress your innovative thinking and call out 'danger, danger,' and everything stops. 

This negativity bias is natural, and it's there for a reason. This is why we need to do the work to counter the roadblock and get on with creating those growth innovations.

Uncertainties of a potential innovation can be found in 4 core areas:


1. Tactical
2. Financial
3. Technical
4. Behavioural

When mentoring my clients, I always get them to outline the tactical uncertainties first. If their idea is not tactically aligned with their business objectives or with a critical insight, they're going to waste time and money.

A tactical uncertainty often includes either the problem you are trying to solve (we'll call this an insight) or a strategic fit with the organisation's vision or priorities.

Here are some questions to help prompt what tactical uncertainties you might have:


• "How well does your idea respond to an insight?"
• "Is this a market problem people want to be solved?", 
• "Is this a strategic fit for our business?" 
• "Does this respond to our current business priorities?"

Don't judge them yet. Just write them out.

It's a much easier game once you've got the uncertainties listed out. Then ask, "How can I validate or test the tactics of this idea?" NB: Make sure you've downloaded and read our Relaxed Leaders Guide to Getting Anyone to Innovate to find out about the best validation activities to do.

The most critical validation is to validate whether the problem you've identified is one that the market truly wants to be solved.

Now that we've got the tactical uncertainties flagged, we can move onto the financial side.
 

If you've been able to validate that the market wants the problem solved, you can start to think of ways to see if they're willing to pay for a solution.

Here are some questions to prompt the financial uncertainties:

• "How deep are the pockets of this market?"
• "How big are the rewards compared to the risk involved?" 
• "How many competitors would/ do compete in this space?"
• "How long would it take to see a return?"
• "Would it be possible to use pres-sales to fund this idea?"
• "Would we be able to create accurate cost estimates for this project?"

If the market you will tap into is cash strapped and the market isn't massive, your rewards are likely to be low. This idea might be best dropped or adapted somewhere in another way.

The most crucial validation here is to validate whether the market is willing to pay for the solution. In short, you want to validate the buyer's intent. The easiest way is to create a landing page with a by now button and some cheap social media ads that advertise the problem and solution and send them to your landing page. The more people that click on the 'buy now' button, the more validation you have.


The more technical unknowns of how to build something or make something work, the less appealing the innovation becomes. Unless… there are people we can outsource to help or do the activity for us at a reasonable price.


Most people mistakenly dive into the technical feasibility of a project before assessing it tactically or financially.

People will tell you to do this, but frankly, it's the WRONG thing to do. Why waste hours or days trying to work out the idea's technical feasibility if no market wants the problem solved or is willing to pay for it?

Tactics and Financial opportunities first.

Here are some questions to help prompt what technical uncertainties you might have:

• "How many unknowns are there to construct this solution?" 
• "Do you have the technical skills to solve this?"
• "Is there anything you could outsource in the construction of this or in improving the usability? 
• "Is there any automation that might make it even faster or easier to use?"
• "Is it possible to ensure quality?"
• "Do you have the project management skills to do this?

If your idea has hundreds of unknowns or you don't have the technical expertise to solve them or the money to get expert help, the signs are saying to ditch it.
 

People sometimes behave differently from what we would like them to. They ignore one advertisement but flock to another. They ignore instructions and assemble our product the wrong way. If there is any uncertainty in how people respond or act, we want to know about it. This way, we can test for it and see how we can influence and nudge that behaviour into a preferred pattern.


Here are some questions to help prompt what behavioural uncertainties you might have:

• "What's the financial, emotional, or physical cost to a customer if they don't use our business offering?"
• "What are the biggest mistakes someone is likely to make using our product offering?"
• "What assumptions would a customer have about how to use our product?"
• "How might a customer interpret our product offering?"
• "What does our customer care about that we don't care about?"
• "What prompts your customer to use a product or service?"
• "what proof would a customer need to see that your offering is better?"

• You now know some ways to get those uncertainties out of your head and onto paper.

• Now that you have the uncertainties, you want to be able to prioritise them.

This is much simpler than you might think.

You draw a graph with an XY axis. Like the one shown and label one axis Uncertainty and the other axis Implication.

And you now plot your uncertainty. If the issue has a high level of uncertainty and a high implication (that is, if you get this wrong)

A risky assumption has high uncertainty and high implications. Any assumption that is high in uncertainty and high in implication is an assumption you want to test before testing any other assumption. To help you establish which assumption to focus on, it pays to assess it with some criteria. 

The assumptions plotted furthest into the top right corner of the graph are the ones you need to test first. You'll find that the level of uncertainty decreases with each series of validation tests. The more the uncertainty decreases, the lower the risk. An assumption of high uncertainty with low implication might not warrant being tested until much later, if at all.