Top-tier workplaces often boast a cafe, a fitness center and nap pods. Ben & Jerry’s offers something much more unique — a cemetery. The Flavor Graveyard honors the legacies of ice creams that are “dearly depinted.” But the headstones are more silly than somber, featuring funny epitaphs for flavors such as “Holy Cannoli,” “Purple Passion Fruit” and “Rainforest Crunch.”
Why does Ben & Jerry’s work so hard to celebrate these flops? Because failure is an integral part of their business model. When the company began operations in 1978, it entered a space with several established competitors. To carve out market share, leadership decided to invent exotic new flavors exclusive to the brand.
The result, in part, is over 300 discontinued ice creams. But over time, the strategy paid off, and the upstart organization produced several breakthrough ideas on the road to becoming the top-selling ice cream brand in the United States.
It’s a story all of us could learn from. We’re taught to prioritize high probability opportunities and pursue quality over quantity. In many contexts, this is wise advice, but every organization will face dilemmas where none of the paths forward offer a high chance of success. There is no way to predict the popularity of an ice cream flavor with just a whiteboard and an erasable marker.
In these moments, leaders have two options:
- Pick one unlikely idea and try to “beat the odds.”
- Experiment with a long list of ideas, creating numerous opportunities for success.
The appeal of option two is apparent at face value, and new research has uncovered strategies to help us exercise this often overlooked opportunity more effectively.
Incorporate AI into your brainstorming
While new research has uncovered notable limitations in AI’s decision-making ability, recent studies also show that AI can serve as a valuable brainstorming tool. Its automated nature offers something similar to persistence in human ideation. Its ability to suppress “unrelated categories of knowledge” mimics focus. Finally, AI’s lack of a personal agenda represents a quality similar to flexibility. While it’s still important for human leaders to take responsibility for outcomes, adding a persistent, focused, flexible thinker to the team is rarely a bad idea.
Evaluate your ideas against a clear definition of success
We’re often warned that too many options will overwhelm our thinking. History doesn’t fully support that claim. The quest to invent a practical incandescent lamp centered on one key issue: finding a filament that could get hot enough to glow for extended periods without catching fire or burning out. Thomas Edison outcompeted his peers in pursuit of valuable patents by experimenting with 6,000 different plant materials. Through this inglorious process, he discovered an unlikely winner — carbonized bamboo. Standards are an antidote to decision paralysis. Define success, and ideas worth pursuing will be more likely to reveal themselves.
Don’t settle for ideas that come easily
We often assume that once we’ve run out of easy ideas, there must be no good options left. This leads many people to undervalue ideas that don’t come easily — or to stop brainstorming altogether. Researchers from Northwestern have dubbed this the “creative-cliff illusion.” As brainstorming drags on, indeed, the frequency of ideas will usually decline. It’s also true that you might begin to feel tired and frustrated with the process. But studies show that, despite how you feel in the moment, the quality of your thinking will usually improve after the pace of new ideas slows down.
Pursue low probability steps early in your experimental process
Production thinking emphasizes the longest pole in the tent. Probabilistic thinking emphasizes the steps with the longest odds. When testing ideas, reordering projects to frontload unlikely prerequisites to success is a straightforward way to fail fast — and uncover opportunities with high potential ROI.
Whereas people who get lucky are the winners of societal odds, people who try repeatedly act like their own miniature society, experiencing both the predicted failures and the predicted successes in a given set of circumstances.
Mozart composed more than 600 pieces of music. Beethoven wrote more than 700. Van Gogh painted and sketched so prolifically, he averaged roughly one new work of art every 36 hours for 10 years. Add these case studies to the stories of Ben & Jerry’s and Thomas Edison, and we find that — across disciplines — quality often lives on the other side of quantity. Whether you’re trying to launch a successful product, reach a significant scientific discovery or create enduring works of art, playing the odds can make unlikely successes seem more inevitable.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
____________________________________
Take advantage of SmartBrief’s FREE email newsletters on leadership and business transformation, among the company’s more than 250 industry-focused newsletters.
