Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Predicting the Success of New Ideas

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

When new ideas are presented, it turns out that middle managers may not have the best track record for predicting success. Adam Grant, author of The New York Times bestseller Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, explains why peers have the edge in giving feedback. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. In the workplace, classroom, or just life in general, we're often confronted with new ideas. So how do we know which ones will actually work? Adam Grant is a professor at the Wharton School of Business and author of the bestselling book, How Nonconformists Move the World. According to Grant, a good group to consult is peers. So I think my favorite way to look at this

comes from this study that a former student of mine, Justin Berg, did. He's now a professor at Stanford, and he wanted to know, how do you predict the success of new ideas? So he studied circus artists, like at Cirque du Soleil. He got them to submit videos of their own acts, really novel ones, like you've never seen before.

So different ways of juggling and acrobatics and clowns, although it turns out everyone hates clowns. But he was interested in, could you predict how successful the videos were going to be with audiences? So 13,000-plus audience members watch the videos. They rate how much they like them. They share them on social. They can also donate some of their own money to them to see if they really would pay to see the performers. And the first group that he looks at is people judging their own acts, the artists themselves.

They are awful. They're way too positive on their own performances, and they fall in love with lots of bad ideas. Then he looks at middle managers, and they are disastrous, too, for the opposite reason. they're too negative. Every brand new idea that they see, they compare it to a prototype of what's been successful in the past, and they're like, yeah, this isn't going to work. They look for all the reasons that an idea is going to fail, not why it's going to succeed. Then there's a third group that's better than both of them, which is peers, fellow creators, circus performers judging each other's acts. Unlike the artists themselves, they have enough distance to say,

you know, this is really not a good idea. But unlike the managers, they're invested in the creative process. So I think we could all do a better job seeking peer feedback. If we're managers, one of the things we can do is we can get ourselves to think more like creators. So Justin did a study where he had people judge ideas. And first, he just gave them five minutes to generate ideas of their own. And that made them more open to novel possibilities because they experienced them instead of just evaluating them. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.