“We want creative and innovative ideas.”

What tends to accompany this request, though unsaid, is “as long as they feel familiar, fit our current process and come with a track record of success.”  This is innovation ordered off the kid’s menu – new idea, but hold the new.

The unsaid part reveals itself subconciously through the judging process.  Familiar ideas come with a shared template, we know what “good” looks like because we’ve seen it before, or at least seen something close enough to pretend.  But novel ideas don’t have that luxury. Without a common template, everyone falls back on personal taste, pet theories and whatever scar tissue they collected in a 2017 budget meeting. That creates disagreement and disagreement gets mislabeled as risk.

In other words, consensus is often just familiarity.  There’s research behind this.

In one study, participants associated creative ideas with words like “poison,” “vomit” and “agony,” which feels a bit dramatic.

The chart below shows a cleaner version of the same problem using sandwich ideas.  Sandwich shop employees evaluated menu ideas. Some were ordinary, others more novel.

• In the baseline condition, people were asked how successful each sandwich would be.
• In the novelty-as-value condition, they were asked to imagine a restaurant specializing in sandwiches no one had tried before.

That tiny framing changed everything.

In the baseline condition, people disagreed much more about the high-novelty sandwiches. Once novelty was framed as the whole point, that disagreement dropped. The odd sandwiches became easier to evaluate because people had been given the right yardstick.

That is the lesson hiding in the lunch meat.  Organizations want innovation but tend to evaluate it using criteria built for predictability. “What’s the projected return?” “Where has this worked before?” “Can you show comparable results?” These are not bad questions for familiar tactics but they’re lousy questions for genuinely new ones since they turn novelty into a defect before the idea has a chance to breathe.

The fix isn’t to worship novelty for its own sake but rather to decide upfront when novelty is part of the value. If the goal is incremental improvement, fine, grade ideas on proof, predictability and ease of execution. But if the goal is to break out of a declining pattern, then the grading system has to change.

Ask different questions.

• Does this idea create a new reason to pay attention?
• Does it reach a different donor motivation?
• Does it break a category convention that deserves breaking?
• Is the downside containable?
• Can we test it cheaply?
• What would we need to learn before scaling?

Cost is usually knowable, time is somewhat knowable. Return, for a genuinely novel idea, is mostly make believe with decimals.

So the next time you send an RFP asking for innovative thinking, protect it from being judged by the same reflexes that make the familiar feel safe.

If you ask for a new sandwich and then punish everything that doesn’t look like turkey on wheat, don’t blame the kitchen when lunch tastes exactly like yesterday.

Kevin