"We need an app!" the CEO announced with absolute certainty. The room fell silent as everyone turned to look at him. It was the third meeting this month where an app had been presented as the answer before we'd even agreed on the question. As the consultant brought in to help with innovation, I felt that familiar knot in my stomach.
This wasn't a new situation for me. During my years working at a digital agency, clients would regularly walk through our doors convinced an app was the solution to their business problems. "Our competitors have an app, so we need one too," they'd tell us. Or "Apps are the future - we can't get left behind."
One client stands out in my memory. The marketing director of a retail chain arrived with detailed wireframes for an app she'd already promised her board. When I gently asked what problem the app would solve for their customers, she looked surprised. "Well, they can browse our products on it," she said. When I pointed out customers could already do that on their website, there was an awkward silence.
Instead of simply building what she asked for, we spent a day with her team using some simple tactics to dig deeper. We discovered their real challenge wasn't getting customers to browse more products—it was helping them find the right products faster. The solution wasn't a browsing app but a smarter search function on their existing website. It cost a quarter of the proposed app budget and led to a 30% increase in conversions.
This pattern repeats across businesses everywhere. Teams jump to solutions before truly understanding the problems they're trying to solve, wasting money and missing better opportunities.
The difference between success and failure wasn't budget or talent—it was approach. The successful teams had simple tools to test ideas before spending money on building them.
After working with hundreds of companies on innovation challenges, I've found five powerful tactics from Innovation Tactics by Tom Kerwin that can help any team find what really matters before building something no one wants.
Five Tactics That Help Teams Build Things People Actually Want
These five tactics work together as a system to help you find real problems before wasting time on unwanted solutions:
- Solution Aikido: Redirecting solution-first thinking to uncover hidden problems and opportunities
- Time Machine: Using imagined futures to identify potential risks and pitfalls
- Multiverse Map: Mapping potential user journeys to identify critical decision points
- Pivot Triggers: Establishing clear signals for when to adapt or abandon ideas
- Anatomy of an Insight: Separating observations from interpretations to broaden thinking
Let's explore each tactic through a fictional tale: imagine you're working with Pip's Café, a made-up coffee shop where the owner is determined to build a mobile app, despite your concerns that it might not address their core business challenges. This story will help illustrate how these tactics might work in a relatable situation, though all scenarios and outcomes are entirely fictional.
1. Solution Aikido: Redirect Solution Fixation to Uncover Real Problems
When someone presents a solution (like "we need an app!") before clearly defining the problem, resistance typically backfires and entrenches their position. Solution Aikido offers a more effective approach—like the martial art it's named after, it uses the energy of the other person's idea rather than opposing it directly.
Why Solution Aikido Works
For most people, jumping to solutions is easier than articulating underlying problems. Rather than dismissing these solution-first impulses, Solution Aikido helps you channel that energy to uncover the real needs driving the proposed solution. This approach builds alliance rather than opposition and often leads to better solutions everyone supports.
💡 Tip: Your influence begins when you arrive at the conversation willing to be persuaded. Start by finding something genuinely positive about their idea before exploring what's behind it.
How to Practice Solution Aikido
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Start with validation
- Let the person fully express their solution idea
- Summarise it back to them accurately
- Find something genuinely positive to acknowledge about it
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Explore the underlying needs
- Ask indirect questions: "Once you have this app, what happens next?"
- Follow with direct questions: "What problem are you trying to solve with this idea?"
- Dig deeper: "What makes that problem so important to address?"
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Use labelling to confirm understanding
- Paraphrase what you've heard: "It seems like you want to achieve X without the frustration of Y?"
- Listen for confirmation or clarification
- Continue exploring until you hear "that's right!"
Our Fictional Tale: Pip's Café
In our imaginary story, instead of immediately questioning the café owner's app idea, you might engage in a conversation like this:
You: "I can see why an app seems appealing. Mobile ordering is definitely a growing trend. What's the main thing you're hoping the app will help with?"
Owner: "Well, customers will have the app on their phones and think of us more, like pre-order drinks. Also, apps are cool."
You: "What matters most about the pre-ordering capability?"
Owner: "There are long queues at certain times, and we're trying to predict when this happens. I see people walking away instead of queuing. I'd rather they pre-order and be confident they can get their coffee when they want it."
You: "So it sounds like you want to even out order volumes without overwhelming your baristas and without losing customers to long waits?"
Owner: "That's right! The app seemed like the most straightforward solution."
In this fictional exchange, the real issue isn't a lack of an app—it's unpredictable order flow and customer retention during busy periods. This insight would open the door to consider multiple solutions, including potentially simpler and less expensive options than a full mobile app.
2. Time Machine: Anticipate Future Successes and Failures
Most planning focuses on how an idea will succeed. The Time Machine tactic balances this by helping teams imagine both brilliant success and spectacular failure, identifying risks that are otherwise hard to see when looking forward.
Why Time Machine Works
Few plans work exactly as expected. By mentally time-travelling to a future where your idea has either succeeded brilliantly or failed miserably, you can identify critical factors that might not be obvious in present-focused planning. This pre-mortem approach helps teams prepare for potential pitfalls and amplify elements crucial for success.
💡 Tip: When imagining the failure scenario, push participants to be specific and dramatic. What exactly went wrong? What were the consequences? The more vivid the imagined failure, the more valuable insights you'll uncover.
How to Run a Time Machine Exercise
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Imagine brilliant success
- Set a specific future date (e.g., one year after launch)
- Ask participants to write what they see and hear in this great future
- Cluster similar observations and summarise key themes
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Imagine spectacular failure
- Using the same future date, ask what's visible in a world where everything went terribly wrong
- Encourage specific details about what failed and why
- Cluster and summarise these negative scenarios
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Identify critical factors
- Pair positive and negative outcomes that represent opposite ends of the same spectrum
- Vote on which negative scenarios seem most plausible and severe
- Use these insights to strengthen your approach or reconsider assumptions
Continuing Our Fictional Tale
In our imaginary café story, a Time Machine exercise might reveal success indicators like "80% of regular customers use the app for ordering" and "Staff report smoother workflow with predictable order pacing." Conversely, failure scenarios might include "App downloaded but rarely used after first order" and "Development costs exceeded budget by 300% for features customers don't use."
Through this hypothetical process, the café owner might discover that their greatest risks aren't technical but behavioural—will customers actually change their ordering habits enough to justify the app investment? This insight could lead to testing smaller interventions before committing to full app development in our story.
3. Multiverse Map: Chart Critical User Decision Points
While teams often focus on the technical aspects of implementing an idea, customers only care about their experience using it. The Multiverse Map tactic helps you visualise customer journeys through your innovation, highlighting critical decision points where success or failure happens.
Why Multiverse Map Works
Your idea's success depends on people taking specific actions that are outside your control. By mapping the best-case and worst-case decisions at each step of their journey, you can identify where to focus your efforts and how many people might actually complete the critical path to value.
💡 Tip: Remember that you're mapping behaviours of people outside your control. The goal isn't just to document the ideal path but to honestly assess where real people might take different directions than you hope.
How to Create a Multiverse Map
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Map the ideal first step
- Identify what a potential customer experiences first in the best possible world
- Write this on a green sticky note
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Continue the ideal journey
- Add what happens next in the best possible scenario
- Continue adding steps until you reach the desired outcome
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Add alternative paths
- For each step, identify what might happen instead in a worst-case scenario
- Write these alternatives on orange sticky notes below each green one
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Add probabilities
- Estimate the percentage of people likely to follow each path
- Calculate how many of your initial audience might complete the entire journey
The Next Chapter in Our Story
For our fictional Pip's Café app, a Multiverse Map might start with "Customer sees promotion for app" (best case) or "Customer doesn't notice app promotion" (worst case). Following through the imagined journey would reveal critical steps like app download, account creation, first order, and repeat usage.
By adding hypothetical probabilities to each step (perhaps only 40% of people who download the app complete account creation, and only 30% of those place a second order), our imaginary café owner might discover that only a small percentage of initial customers would become regular app users. In our story, this could inform decisions about how much to invest in the app versus alternative approaches to managing order flow.
4. Pivot Triggers: Know When to Change Direction
Innovation requires commitment, but also flexibility. Pivot Triggers help teams define in advance what signals would indicate it's time to adapt or abandon a particular approach, preventing the sunk cost fallacy from driving continued investment in ideas that aren't working.
Why Pivot Triggers Work
Your innovation's success depends on behaviours and systems outside your control. By defining in advance what evidence would indicate your approach isn't working, you remove emotional attachment from the decision to pivot, making it easier to adapt quickly when needed.
💡 Tip: Remember that pivoting doesn't mean failing—it means learning. You don't need to know exactly what you'll pivot to; the insights gained from your current approach will inform that decision when needed.
How to Establish Pivot Triggers
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Identify critical success behaviours
- What specific customer or system behaviours must you see for your idea to succeed?
- What metrics will reliably indicate these behaviours are occurring?
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Define minimum thresholds
- How much of each behaviour is "just enough" to indicate you're on the right track?
- By when would you need to see these indicators?
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Create clear pivot statements
- Format decisions as: "We'll pivot if we don't see [X amount of behaviour] by [date]"
- Ensure statements are specific and measurable
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Share and schedule check-ins
- Communicate pivot triggers to all stakeholders
- Schedule specific dates to evaluate performance against triggers
Decision Points in Our Tale
For our fictional café app, pivot triggers might include:
"We'll pivot if fewer than 25% of customers who are told about the app download it within the first month."
"We'll pivot if fewer than 40% of customers who download the app use it more than once."
"We'll pivot if adding push notifications doesn't increase repeat usage by at least 15% within two weeks."
In our story, these specific triggers would allow the café owner to test the app concept in stages, with clear decision points along the way. If early indicators showed low adoption in this fictional scenario, they could shift approach before investing heavily in advanced features or marketing.
5. Anatomy of an Insight: Broaden Your Interpretation of Evidence
When pursuing innovation, teams often observe customer behaviour but jump to a single interpretation. The Anatomy of an Insight tactic helps separate what you've actually observed (signals) from what you believe it means (stories) and what you think you should do next (options).
Why Anatomy of an Insight Works
Our brains naturally construct narratives to explain what we observe, but these initial interpretations are often incomplete or biased. By deliberately generating multiple explanations for the same observations, teams discover new possibilities and avoid premature commitment to a single approach.
💡 Tip: Try this tactic independently first to develop the skill, but its power grows exponentially when done with a diverse team who bring different perspectives to the same signals.
How to Conduct an Anatomy of an Insight
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List observable signals
- Record specific things you've seen, heard, or measured—just the facts
- Avoid including interpretations at this stage
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Generate potential actions
- Identify options for what you might do next based on these signals
- Don't evaluate or filter at this stage; just list possibilities
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Uncover underlying stories
- For each proposed action, articulate the story that makes it seem like a good response
- What beliefs about the situation make this action logical?
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Create alternative stories
- Generate at least two alternative interpretations that could explain the same signals
- Add any additional signals you might have overlooked initially
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Expand options based on new stories
- For each new interpretation, identify what actions would make sense
- Look for patterns in what stories resonate most with your team
The Final Chapter of Our Café Tale
In our story, the café owner observes that "many customers leave when they see the long queue" (signal). Their first interpretation might be "customers don't have time to wait," leading to the option "build an app for pre-ordering."
Alternative stories in our fictional scenario might include:
"Customers can't tell how long the wait will be and assume the worst" (leading to options like visible queue time estimates)
"Customers don't feel the wait is worthwhile for standard coffee they can get elsewhere" (leading to options like highlighting unique offerings)
"The queue moves slower than it needs to due to order complexities" (leading to options like streamlining the menu during peak hours)
In this imaginary case study, this process might reveal that an app is just one of several potential approaches, and perhaps not the most effective one for the actual problem the fictional café is facing.
From Tactics to Transformation: Building an Innovation Mindset
While each tactic is valuable individually, they create a powerful system when used together:
- Start with Solution Aikido when facing solution-first thinking, redirecting that energy toward understanding underlying needs
- Use Time Machine to anticipate potential successes and failures before committing resources
- Create a Multiverse Map to visualise critical user decision points that determine success
- Establish Pivot Triggers to know when to adapt or abandon approaches that aren't working
- Apply Anatomy of an Insight to generate multiple interpretations of what you observe
This system helps transform innovation from guesswork or solution-fixation into a methodical process of discovery and validation.
Addressing Common Objections
"We don't have time for all this analysis"
Consider how much time and resources might be wasted by building the wrong solution. Imagine a technology company that spends nine months and £450,000 developing a feature that less than 2% of users adopt. Just two days spent on these tactics could potentially reveal fundamental flaws in their assumptions before such extensive investment.
These tactics don't require months—most can be conducted in 30-60 minutes and save months of misdirected effort.
"Our situation is unique"
While your specific context is unique, the fundamental challenges of innovation are universal: understanding real needs, testing assumptions, and adapting based on evidence. These tactics are flexible frameworks that can be applied to any innovation challenge, from product development to service design to internal process improvement.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Using these tactics as box-ticking exercises rather than genuine efforts to uncover insights
- Conducting them only with like-minded team members instead of including diverse perspectives
- Treating initial findings as permanent truths rather than hypotheses to test and refine
- Keeping insights within the product or innovation team instead of sharing them across the organisation
- Failing to document and revisit learnings from previous innovation efforts
The Difference Between Teams That Innovate and Teams That Imitate
Let's imagine how our opening scenario might resolve. If that CEO from the beginning of our story had introduced these tactics to their innovation process, they might have transformed their approach. Rather than immediately building their app, they could test specific assumptions with a simple landing page and notifications system first. This might reveal that customers valued order tracking more than pre-ordering, potentially leading to a streamlined solution costing significantly less to develop while achieving much higher adoption than their original concept.
The difference wasn't resources or creativity. It was a willingness to challenge assumptions, explore multiple interpretations, and test ideas methodically before committing fully.
In today's competitive landscape, the advantage goes to teams that can innovate efficiently—finding and solving real problems rather than building impressive solutions to problems nobody has. These five tactics provide a systematic approach to uncovering those opportunities and transforming how your team innovates.
Take Your Innovation Process to the Next Level
Ready to transform your team's approach to innovation? These tactics are just the beginning of a systematic approach to discovering and developing opportunities that matter.
For a complete toolkit of validated innovation practices, Innovation Tactics by Tom Kerwin gives you 54 practical innovation tools in a beautiful card deck, covering every stage from opportunity discovery to idea validation to implementation. Each card provides clear instructions and examples you can apply immediately.
Developed through work with hundreds of organisations, these tactics have helped teams across industries transform their approach to innovation—focusing their creative energy on solving problems that matter.
Innovation isn't about sudden flashes of genius or building impressive technology for its own sake—it's about systematically discovering opportunities others miss and creating solutions that truly make a difference. Start your innovation transformation today.
Based on tactics from Innovation Tactics by Tom Kerwin.
"These innovation tactics transformed how our team approaches new ideas. Instead of falling in love with our first solution, we now explore problems deeply before committing resources. The results have been remarkable." - Charles Burdett, Founder of Pip Decks
One of the few newsletters I look forward to.
— Dave Cunningham, Head of DesignOps @ NHS
