How to Overcome Your Own Leadership & Founder Bias.
I've been a Lean Startup practitioner for well over a decade. The "Founder's Bias" (or, confirmation bias) is one of my favorite lean concepts to cover, and it's also one that I've taught in Her Brand & Co's flagship accelerator, The Lucy Lab, to hundreds of founders.
So what is confirmation bias? It's exactly what it sounds like...as the founder (ergo, the leader) we have an implicit bias to be right, and we favor information that will confirm our own beliefs and hypotheses. There are a few things that could contribute to this, such as:
Overconfidence, where founders overestimate their knowledge or control over outcomes
The Illusion of Control, where we might overshoot the net of our own influence over external events, thinking that we can control outcomes more than we actually can. (Ha, the biggest entrepreneurial joke is that we think we have control. Part of finding success is getting lost and losing a bit of control, but that's a post for another day).
The Law of Small Numbers, where we draw conclusions from a small sample size that leads to skewed assumptions and strategies
Eric Ries, a pioneer of modern-day lean startup and author of The Lean Startup famously said:
"The big question of our time is not Can be it built? But Should it be built?"
I just spent the last 2.5 weeks in a swirly, creative, confusing, and challenging headspace.
Since the acquisition of Her Brand & Co., we've been collecting customer data and feedback in anticipation of our new launch. I intuitively knew (loosely), some assets we would need to relaunch HBC 2.0, but I was really on the struggle bus to figure out how to tie it all together.
When you grow a brand that you love, not only are you loaded with every memory of that journey, but you're also inundated with every intimate function of the business.
Your past, present, and future is smushed up into one messy, unclear memory soup.”
It's hard to see the forest beyond the trees. So knowing that I would be tasked with figuring out what to propose for our new offerings, I felt 7+ years of confirmation bias creeping in, creating friction to my normal flow of imagining and intuition.
So, I decided to try something new.
In order to see Her Brand & Co. from a fresh perspective and approach it with curiosity, as I would with any other client or project, I needed to remove mental obstacles, which meant I needed to emotionally distance (sever) from the brand.
As soon as I figured out how to do that, my brain exploded with ideas. I could now see the threads that tied it all together, and I was able to gather the tools I needed to help me find the answers I was looking for. At the end of the day, this led me to create a clear action plan that's directly correlated to long-term revenue and scalability goals.
Are you finding yourself being pushed up against your own confirmation bias? Or do you have a project you're leading that you feel a little too close to?
Here's what I did:
I created a digital "war room" for myself. For me, this meant removing Her Brand & Co's logo from my digital brainstorming space (I replaced it with a random one from Canva), and I renamed the company to an ambiguous entity.
I gave myself exactly .37 seconds to decide on a fake name, and I went with the first that popped into my brain. (Some might want me to share, but I'm going to keep that close to the chest because it lives in solitude, and once it's published, it can no longer be isolated, in my opinion). The point is the same though -- create a fake name and go with the first thing you think of, don't spend too much time on it. The point is to get to a place where you're working on a "new" project. (Who says temporary disassociation isn't a skill?)
Next, I worked with two different team members and asked them to synthesize all of the customer data; one has an academic research background, and the other has built big brands for big agencies. My goal was to see what trends or through-lines they would present from their findings from their different perspectives. This would give me hints into where the pockets or truth could be living for our customers.
Lastly, after receiving their feedback and recommendations, I then ran every customer data point (removing anything proprietary or confidential, of course) through AI. I asked it to compare all of it and synthesize customer trends, and then I specifically asked it to find objections to my ideas that were forming based on what the data presented. It found 4 core objections.
Lastly, based on those objections I asked it to run a probability success matrix. It presented me with two final core concepts and their respective probability of success (upwards of 90% success rate), based on the unique data from our customers, my input, two other team members, and the interwebs (a lot of data, indeed).
Now, an AI whiz will probably find a faux-pas in my experiment, as I am not a computer scientist or statistical analyst by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm really good at putting arbitrary and complex pieces of puzzles together and serving up a comprehensive vision -- and I got my answer.
Here's what's interesting about all of this....
Where I landed and what I ultimately ended up presenting were 2 concepts that we've circled around before in previous years. These ideas are not fundamentally new.
They are, however, more viable now, and that's the part that matters.
Before the acquisition, my co-founder and I didn't have the manpower to create and support what we needed (which we knew). This entire 2.5-week exercise took me around the sun and back again to a familiar place, but with a few key modifications.
How very serendipitous, indeed.
So....curious what we're embarking on next?
While we're in pre-launch mode, we're reengaging our customers and partners with a new type of event series we've never done before. The first email went out about it this morning (exciting!). As always, innovation is a wild ride, and I hope this has helped anyone feeling stuck, blocked, or inhibited by their own way.
Stay tuned for more, and 🚀 up up, and away.
