How Will You Measure Your Life?. Clayton Christensen

      Of course, it’s easy to say be open to opportunities as they emerge. It’s much harder to know which strategy you should actually pursue. Is the current deliberate strategy the best course to continue on, or is it time to adopt a different strategy that is emerging? What happens if ten opportunities present at once? Or if one of them requires a substantial investment on your part just to find out whether it’s something that you’re going to enjoy? Ideally, you don’t want to have to go through medical school to figure out you don’t want to be a doctor. So what can you do to figure out what has the best chance of working out for you?

      There’s a tool that can help you test whether your deliberate strategy or a new emergent one will be a fruitful approach. It forces you to articulate what assumptions need to be proved true in order for the strategy to succeed. The academics who created this process, Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, called it “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?”

      As simple as it sounds, companies seldom think about whether to pursue new opportunities by asking this question. Instead, they often unintentionally stack the deck for failure from the beginning. They make decisions to go ahead with an investment based on what initial projections suggest will happen, but then they never actually test whether those initial projections are accurate. So, they can find themselves far down the line, adjusting projections and assumptions to fit what is actually happening, rather than making and testing thoughtful choices before they get too far in.

      Here’s how the flawed process usually works.

      An employee or a group of employees come up with an innovative idea for a new product or service; they’re enthusiastic about their idea, and they want their colleagues to be, too. But to convince senior management of the idea’s potential, they need to come up with a business plan. They are acutely aware that for management to approve the project, the numbers had better look good—but the team often won’t really know how customers will respond to the idea, what the true costs will turn out to be, and so on. So they guess—they make assumptions. Frequently, planners are sent back to the drawing board to change their guesses. But this is rarely because they have learned new information; instead, innovators and middle managers typically know how good the numbers have to look in order for their proposal to get funded, so they often need to cycle back and “improve” their guesses in order for the proposal to get the go-ahead.