How to test big ideas without losing your shirt

"That's our third failed product launch this year," I remember a former colleague lamenting as we reviewed another expensive innovation flop. Their team had spent six months and nearly £500,000 developing a new feature their customers "definitely wanted"—only to see virtually zero adoption upon release.

This scenario plays out in businesses everywhere, where teams invest significant resources into ideas that never gain traction. What struck me was not just the wasted money and time, but the psychological impact: team morale was crushed, risk aversion increased, and future innovation efforts were jeopardised. The most painful part? Most of these failures could have been detected in the first few weeks with the right approach.

Years later, I witnessed the opposite scenario at a small craft coffee shop. Before investing in an expensive mobile ordering system, they tested customer interest using nothing more than a paper sign-up sheet and a Google Form. Within two weeks, they knew exactly which features mattered most to customers—and which seemingly "essential" ones they could skip entirely. When they finally launched their streamlined system months later, adoption was immediate and enthusiastic.

The difference between these scenarios wasn't luck or even market conditions—it was methodology. The coffee shop used what I call "probe-based innovation"—a lean, systematic approach to testing ideas through small experiments before making major investments.

After studying countless innovation successes and failures, I've identified five powerful tactics that form the backbone of effective probe-based innovation. These approaches allow you to validate concepts, identify pitfalls, and refine ideas with minimal risk—before committing significant resources.

The Five Tactics for Probe-Based Innovation

The following five tactics from Innovation Tactics by Pip Decks provide a framework for testing ideas efficiently and effectively:

1. Time Machine: Identify potential failure modes before they happen by vividly imagining future scenarios
2. Multiverse Map: Map the different paths a user might take through your innovation to spot critical decision points
3. Pivot Triggers: Define clear metrics that signal when to change direction before investing too deeply
4. Behavioural Probe: Test big ideas with small, quick experiments that measure actual behaviour
5. Anatomy of an Insight: Transform observations into meaningful actions by separating signals from stories

Let's explore each tactic using a real-world example: a café considering whether to develop a mobile pre-ordering app for coffee.

1. Time Machine: Uncovering Hidden Hopes and Fears

Before rushing into development, the Time Machine tactic helps teams identify potential failure modes by mentally "travelling" to possible futures.

Why it works

Traditional planning focuses only on success scenarios, creating blind spots for potential failures. The Time Machine tactic neutralizes optimism bias by deliberately exploring both positive and negative outcomes. When you mentally "stand" in a future where your idea has failed, you can identify risks that are difficult to see when looking forward.

Cognitive research shows we're much better at explaining the past than predicting the future. By positioning ourselves in an imagined future looking backward, we harness this natural explanatory ability to spot potential pitfalls.

How to use the Time Machine

1. Visualize success
   • Tell your team: "We get in a time machine. When the door opens, it's six months from now, and our idea has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. What do you see around you?"
   • Have everyone write specific observations about this successful future (one per sticky note)
   • Group similar observations into themes and summarize each theme
2. Visualize failure
   • Now say: "We get back in the time machine. This time, when the door opens, it's the same date but in a parallel universe where our idea has failed catastrophically. What happened?"
   • Again, have everyone write observations and potential causes of failure
   • Group and summarize the failure themes
3. Compare positive and negative scenarios
   • Organize the success and failure themes as opposing pairs
   • For unpaired themes, create matching opposites to complete the picture
4. Prioritize risks
   • Have the team vote on the failure scenarios they find most plausible and severe
   • Take note of any significant differences in how team members perceive risks
   • Select the most concerning scenario to address first

Real-world example

When a café owner wanted to build a coffee pre-ordering app, her team was enthusiastic but had different conceptions of success. The Time Machine exercise revealed a critical insight: while the owner focused on increased efficiency, the baristas were concerned about workflow disruption, and the loyal customers worried about losing the personal interaction they valued.

The exercise surfaced several failure scenarios they hadn't considered:

• Customers download the app but don't use it regularly
• Pre-orders create bottlenecks during already busy periods
• Regular customers feel the café has become too impersonal
• The cost of app maintenance exceeds the revenue benefit

The team voted "customers download but don't use the app" as their most concerning risk—a critical insight that shaped their later experiments.

Rather than arguing about whether to proceed, the Time Machine tactic allowed them to identify specific risks they could test before committing to full development. This wasn't about avoiding innovation—it was about innovating more intelligently.

2. Multiverse Map: Mapping Customer Journeys Through Possible Futures

Once you've identified key risks, the Multiverse Map tactic helps visualize the different paths a user might take when interacting with your innovation.

Why it works

Innovators often obsess over features and internal mechanics while overlooking the actual steps a customer takes to discover, understand, and use their innovation. The Multiverse Map shifts focus to the customer's experience, helping teams spot disconnects and friction points in their concept.

By mapping both ideal and worst-case paths side by side, the tactic highlights critical decision points where your innovation could succeed or fail. This reveals which aspects most urgently need testing and validation.

How to create a Multiverse Map

1. Start with your riskiest scenario
   • Use the most concerning failure mode from your Time Machine exercise as your focus
   • In our example: "Customers download the app but don't use it"
2. Map the ideal first touchpoint
   • Ask: "When our work is done, in the best possible world, what will a future customer experience first?"
   • Write this on a green sticky note (e.g., "Customer sees promotion for app in café")
3. Add the next ideal step
   • Ask: "And in the best possible world, what's the very next thing they do or see?"
   • Place this on a green sticky to the right of the first (e.g., "Customer downloads app")
4. Map the corresponding negative outcome
   • Ask: "But in the worst possible world, what do they do or see instead?"
   • Place this on an orange sticky below the green one (e.g., "Customer ignores promotion")
5. Continue building the journey
   • Keep adding green (ideal) and orange (worst-case) steps until you've mapped the complete customer journey
   • Connect the steps with arrows to show the flow
6. Test and refine your story
   • Read the journey aloud from a customer's perspective
   • Add, remove, or rearrange steps until the flow makes intuitive sense
7. Add probability estimates
   • Assign percentage probabilities to each branch in the journey
   • Calculate how many customers from an initial cohort would likely complete the entire positive journey

Real-world example

The café team mapped out their pre-ordering app customer journey, highlighting multiple points where the experience could break down:

The ideal path showed a customer discovering the app, downloading it, setting up an account, placing an order, receiving a confirmation, picking up their drink without waiting, and becoming a regular app user.

But the map also revealed critical failure points:

• Customers being unwilling to download "yet another app"
• Confusion during account setup causing abandonment
• Uncertainty about when to arrive for pickup
• Disappointment if drinks weren't ready upon arrival

When they estimated conversion percentages at each step, they realized that even with optimistic assumptions, only about 18% of initially interested customers would become regular app users. This wasn't necessarily a reason to abandon the idea, but it highlighted which stages of the journey needed the most attention and testing.

Rather than arguing abstractly about whether customers would use the app, the team now had a concrete framework for testing specific aspects of the journey.

3. Pivot Triggers: Setting Clear Signals for Change

With a clear map of potential failure points, the Pivot Triggers tactic establishes objective metrics that indicate when to change direction.

Why it works

Innovation teams typically struggle with two opposing forces: the sunk cost fallacy ("we've invested too much to turn back now") and premature abandonment ("this isn't working immediately, let's scrap it"). Pivot Triggers create objective criteria for decision-making, agreed upon before emotional investment clouds judgment.

By establishing these thresholds in advance, teams can make rational decisions based on evidence rather than opinion or inertia. This reduces both wasteful persistence with failing ideas and hasty abandonment of promising ones that simply need refinement.

How to establish Pivot Triggers

1. Identify critical behaviours
   • Based on your Multiverse Map, determine which user behaviours are essential for success
   • Focus on observable actions, not attitudes or intentions (e.g., "orders through the app" not "likes the app")
2. Define minimum thresholds
   • For each critical behaviour, specify the minimum level that would give you confidence to proceed
   • Be specific about metrics and timeframes (e.g., "25% of informed customers download the app within the first week")
3. Formulate clear statements
   • Combine behaviours and thresholds into Pivot Trigger statements: "We will pivot if we don't see [X amount of behaviour] by [date] when we [test our idea]"
   • Make these statements concrete and unambiguous
4. Gain team commitment
   • Ensure everyone understands and agrees to these triggers
   • Share them with all stakeholders who would be affected by a pivot decision
   • Set specific dates for reviewing progress against these triggers

Real-world example

The café team created several Pivot Triggers based on their Multiverse Map's critical points:

• "We will pivot if fewer than 20% of informed customers download the app within two weeks of promoting it"
• "We will pivot if fewer than 60% of app downloaders complete account setup"
• "We will pivot if fewer than 25% of first-time app users place a second order within 10 days"
• "We will pivot if more than 15% of app orders result in customer complaints about pickup experience"

These triggers gave the team clear guidelines for their experiments and helped prevent both premature abandonment and wasteful persistence. When one metric fell below threshold (account setup completion), they were able to quickly identify and fix a specific user interface issue rather than questioning the entire concept.

Perhaps most importantly, having predefined triggers made emotionally difficult decisions more objective. When two metrics consistently failed to meet thresholds despite multiple improvements, the team could pivot with confidence rather than continuing to invest in an approach with limited potential.

4. Behavioural Probe: Testing Ideas Without Building Them

With clear risks and metrics established, the Behavioural Probe tactic offers ways to test ideas without fully building them.

Why it works

While innovators often focus on the inner workings of their solutions, customers only care about the promise and results. This creates an opportunity to test the market's response without building complicated infrastructure. As the founder of Gü desserts demonstrated when he tested market interest with empty boxes on store shelves, you can measure demand before creating supply.

Behavioural Probes generate evidence of actual behaviour (not just stated interest), dramatically reducing the risk of building something unwanted. They transform abstract discussions about "would people use this?" into concrete observations of what people actually do.

How to develop Behavioural Probes

1. Consider probe types
   • Review different types of Behavioural Probes that could test your idea:
   • Pre-alpha partnership: Customers help develop your idea in exchange for early access
   • Concierge service: Manually deliver the result your innovation promises
   • Movie magic: Create a video or demo of your concept to gauge interest
   • One-time offer: Provide a limited version of your solution
   • Infiltrator: Test interest with a placeholder or mockup
2. Match probes to triggers
   • Select probes that will specifically test your Pivot Triggers
   • Ensure each chosen probe will generate measurable data related to your key metrics
3. Design minimal implementations
   • Create the simplest possible version of each chosen probe
   • Focus on what's necessary to generate behaviour, not comprehensive functionality
4. Implement and measure
   • Deploy your probes and carefully track results against your Pivot Triggers
   • Document both quantitative metrics and qualitative observations

Real-world example

Instead of immediately building a full mobile app, the café team designed several Behavioural Probes to test different aspects of their concept:

1. Download behavior probe: They created posters with QR codes linking to a landing page that described the upcoming app and allowed customers to join a waitlist. This tested interest without building anything.

2. Pre-order process probe: They offered a simple paper form where customers could pre-order their next day's coffee. Orders were manually processed by staff, but customers experienced the core benefit of skipping the line.

3. Pickup experience probe: They created a dedicated pickup area and tested different notification approaches (text message, ticket number) to find what created the smoothest experience.

These probes revealed several crucial insights:

• While signup rates for the waitlist exceeded their thresholds, customers strongly preferred web-based ordering to downloading an app
• The ability to save favourite orders was highly valued, but advance scheduling was rarely used
• The pickup experience was more critical to satisfaction than the ordering process itself

These findings fundamentally reshaped their approach. Rather than building a native app, they created a mobile-optimized website with a saved-order feature and invested more in streamlining the pickup experience—all before writing a single line of code for an app that would have missed these critical user needs.

5. Anatomy of an Insight: Turning Observations into Action

After implementing your Behavioural Probes, the Anatomy of an Insight tactic helps convert raw observations into meaningful decisions.

Why it works

When faced with new information, humans naturally create stories to explain what we observe. While this meaning-making is valuable, we often conflate our observations (signals) with our interpretations (stories) and our conclusions (options). This tactic deliberately separates these elements to avoid premature closure and encourage multiple interpretations of the same evidence.

As Gary Klein notes: "Insights can be described as unexpected shifts to a better story… they transform how we see and feel about the world. Once they are gained, we cannot go back." By exploring multiple stories that could explain the same signals, teams discover more nuanced understandings and avoid simplistic conclusions.

How to analyze insights

1. Collect observations
   • List all the concrete signals you observed during your Behavioural Probe experiments
   • Focus on specific, observable facts rather than interpretations
   • Write each on a yellow sticky note
2. Identify initial action options
   • Based on these observations, what actions might you take?
   • Write these on blue sticky notes
3. Articulate the implicit story
   • For each action, ask: "What story explains why this action makes sense given our observations?"
   • Write these stories on pink sticky notes
4. Generate alternative stories
   • Challenge yourself to create at least two alternative explanations for the same signals
   • As you develop new stories, you may notice additional signals you had overlooked
5. Explore additional actions
   • For each new story, identify actions that would make sense if that story were true
   • Add these new options to your collection
6. Evaluate and decide
   • Have the team vote on which stories resonate most strongly
   • Based on this evaluation, decide whether to proceed with your original idea, adapt it, or pivot to a new approach

Real-world example

After running their probes, the café team gathered to analyze the results. Their key observations included:

• 30% of customers signed up for the waitlist (exceeding their 20% threshold)
• Several customers asked if they could just use a website instead of downloading an app
• Paper pre-orders were highly used for morning coffee but rarely for afternoon visits

Their initial story was: "Customers want pre-ordering but prefer not to download apps. We should build a mobile website instead." This led to the action option: "Pivot from native app to mobile-optimized website."

However, when they forced themselves to create alternative stories, they realized:

Alternative Story 1: "Customers are primarily interested in morning time-saving, not convenience throughout the day." This suggested a more focused solution targeting the morning rush specifically.

Alternative Story 2: "The real value is in saved preferences and quick reordering, not pre-planning." This pointed to a different feature prioritization emphasizing one-click reordering of favourites.

When the team voted, the second alternative story resonated most strongly. Rather than simply switching from app to website, they completely reconceived their approach to focus on rapid reordering of favourite drinks, specifically targeting the morning rush period.

What began as a generic "coffee pre-ordering app" evolved into a much more focused "morning coffee express" concept that directly addressed the specific customer need they had uncovered.

From Concept to Reality: Putting It All Together

While each tactic delivers value independently, they form a powerful system when used together in sequence:

1. Start with Time Machine to identify your biggest risks and opportunities
2. Create a Multiverse Map to visualize the customer journey and critical decision points
3. Establish Pivot Triggers to set clear thresholds for decision-making
4. Deploy Behavioural Probes to test your riskiest assumptions without building the full solution
5. Use Anatomy of an Insight to interpret results and determine your next steps

This sequence creates a virtuous cycle of learning and adaptation that dramatically increases your odds of innovation success while minimizing wasted resources.

Common Objections to Probe-Based Innovation

"We don't have time for all this exploration"

In reality, you don't have time not to do this work. These five tactics typically require 1-2 days of focused effort but can save months of wasted development. A team I advised spent three weeks building the wrong feature because they skipped the two hours it would have taken to run a simple Behavioural Probe.

Think of probe-based innovation as an insurance policy against wasting resources. The less time and budget you have, the more critical it becomes to ensure you're building something viable before committing precious resources.

"Our idea is too complex to test this way"

Even the most complex innovations can be decomposed into testable components. The more complex your idea, the more critical it is to test individual elements before integrating them. A former colleague in automotive design used paper prototypes to test dashboard interfaces for self-driving vehicles long before the actual autonomous systems were ready.

The goal isn't to simulate your entire innovation perfectly—it's to test the riskiest assumptions with minimal investment. The aerospace industry uses this principle religiously, testing components individually before combining them into systems.

"Our stakeholders expect detailed plans, not experiments"

Paradoxically, stakeholders who demand certainty are the ones who benefit most from this approach. I've found that once stakeholders understand these tactics reduce risk rather than create it, they become enthusiastic supporters.

Frame probe-based innovation as responsible risk management rather than aimless experimentation. Show how it increases the probability of success while decreasing resource waste. Most importantly, demonstrate how it provides more reliable data for decision-making than traditional planning alone.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

1. Overthinking your probes - The goal is learning quickly, not perfection. I've seen teams spend weeks designing the "perfect" test when a rough approximation would have yielded 80% of the insights in a fraction of the time.
2. Ignoring negative signals - When faced with evidence that contradicts our hopes, it's tempting to explain it away. A startup I advised dismissed low signup rates as "just because our landing page wasn't pretty enough" rather than acknowledging the deeper problem with their value proposition.
3. Testing too many variables simultaneously - When a probe fails, you need to know why. Test one key assumption at a time whenever possible to ensure clear cause-and-effect understanding.
4. Failing to establish clear Pivot Triggers - Without predetermined thresholds, teams often move goalposts to justify continuing. A financial services firm I worked with kept lowering their "minimum acceptable conversion rate" until it became meaningless.
5. Overlooking qualitative insights - While metrics are important, the off-hand comments and observations during probe testing often contain the most valuable insights. Pay attention to how people interact with your probe, not just whether they do.

When and Where to Use Probe-Based Innovation

While these tactics work for innovations of all sizes, they're particularly valuable in these scenarios:

• High-uncertainty situations where you're entering unfamiliar market territory
• Resource-constrained environments where you can't afford failed launches
• Solutions with significant development costs that require validation before investment
• Ideas that have generated internal disagreement about viability or approach
• Innovations targeting new customer segments whose needs you don't fully understand

I've seen these tactics successfully applied across industries from software to manufacturing, retail to healthcare, and startups to multinational corporations. The principles remain the same regardless of context: test before you invest, measure actual behaviour not stated intentions, and remain open to pivoting based on what you learn.

Three Mindset Shifts for Successful Probe-Based Innovation

Beyond the tactical approaches, successful probe-based innovation requires some fundamental shifts in thinking:

1. From certainty to curiosity

The goal is not to prove your idea is right but to discover what's true. I remember a product manager who began each probe by telling the team, "We're not testing if our idea is good—we're discovering how it needs to evolve to become great." This subtle shift created openness to whatever insights emerged.

2. From big bets to small experiments

Instead of viewing innovation as a single large wager, see it as a series of small, affordable experiments that progressively reduce risk. A veteran entrepreneur I know calls this "paying for information"—spending the minimum necessary to get the specific knowledge you need for your next decision.

3. From failure avoidance to failure learning

When a probe reveals an idea won't work as intended, that's not a failure—it's valuable information acquired at minimal cost. A manufacturing leader I worked with celebrated "fast fails" that prevented much more expensive failures later in the process.

These mindset shifts transform innovation from a high-stress, high-risk endeavor into a methodical process of discovery that consistently produces better results with fewer resources.

Ready to Try Probe-Based Innovation?

Here are two simple ways to get started:

• 10-minute challenge: Choose the tactic that intrigues you most and try it with a colleague on a current idea or challenge. Don't overthink it—just dive in and see what insights emerge.
• Sequential approach: For a more comprehensive experience, work through all five tactics in order on an important innovation project. Each tactic builds on the previous one, creating a powerful system for de-risking your ideas.

Remember that the goal is progress, not perfection. Even an imperfect implementation of these tactics will yield valuable insights that traditional approaches might miss entirely.

Take Your Innovation Practice to the Next Level

Ready to transform how you approach innovation? These five tactics are just the beginning of a more systematic, effective approach to creating successful new offerings.

 

For a complete toolkit of innovation practices, Innovation Tactics by Pip Decks gives you 54 practical innovation tools in a beautiful card deck, covering everything from idea generation to implementation. Each card provides clear instructions and examples you can apply immediately to your next innovation challenge.

Developed through work with hundreds of innovation teams across industries, these tactics have helped thousands of leaders transform their approach from hope-based to evidence-based innovation, dramatically increasing their success rates while reducing waste.

Get Innovation Tactics →

The difference between occasional innovation success and consistent innovation excellence isn't luck or even creativity—it's methodology. Start your journey to more effective innovation today.

Based on tactics from Innovation Tactics by Pip Decks.

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