“We want creative and innovative ideas.”

What self-respecting agency doesn’t like hearing that?  The rub is when it’s neutered by also needing to forecast within three percent of plan, survive a board meeting, and resemble something a peer organization has already tested.

What I’ve realized is that wanting novelty that behaves like familiarity isn’t hypocrisy, it’s incentive alignment.

Familiar ideas come with a shared, often unspoken, mental model and evaluation criteria. Everyone in the room has seen some version of it before, so evaluation feels objective. The channel mix looks responsible, the revenue model resembles last year, the creative feels adjacent to something that “worked.” Agreement emerges because the template already exists.

Truly novel ideas don’t come with that template so the room improvises. One person evaluates through brand risk, another through short term revenue pressure and another through personal taste. Disagreement increases and in committee environments, disagreement is quietly translated into risk.

There is a pyschological solve.

In one study, sandwich shop employees rated potential menu items.

• Control condition:  Half were asked how successful each sandwich would be. The more unusual the sandwich, the more the ratings spread out. Turkey and cheese clustered tightly. The inventive combinations produced variance.
• Test Condition: Researchers changed a single line in the instructions, asking employees to judge success defined by serving sandwiches no one had tried before.

Same sandwiches, different frame.  Disagreement around the high novelty sandwiches melted away like swiss on a rueben. Evaluators aligned more closely when novelty was part of the value proposition. Meanwhile, the conventional sandwiches began to generate more spread.

The only thing that changed was the evaluative lens, now zoom out to fundraising.

The Volume Machine fundraising model rewards predictability and treats forecast variance as a governance problem.  In the quest for efficiency an idea that cannot be benchmarked feels irresponsible, even if leadership is simultaneously declaring that growth requires bold thinking.

So the machine selects for what it can model.

This is where I am less sympathetic. If you say you want innovation but insist on calculating precise ROI on something that has no precedent, you are not being disciplined. You are confusing the appearance of control with control itself. The spreadsheet is not neutral, it becomes your default strategy and it always encodes yesterday’s assumptions as the starting point.

If you want different ideas, you have to change the grading rubric. In RFPs and creative reviews, make novelty an explicit dimension rather than an implicit liability. Separate strategic incoherence from personal discomfort. Treat genuinely new initiatives as portfolio bets with asymmetric upside instead of demanding the same certainty you expect from incremental tweaks.

Otherwise you will continue approving the most defensible variation of what you already do and wondering why retention is flat and acquisition is more expensive every year.

If you frame novelty as risk, it will look risky, if you frame it as part of the strategy, the room recalibrates.

Kevin