Imagine a “strategic person”. Picture them in a meeting room. What’s on the board behind them? Big ideas, no doubt.

If you want to be more strategic, you’ll want to contribute ideas to your organization. Depending on your job, your ideas might be for new products, solutions, or processes. But they’ll probably involve your team doing something new to help your organization and its customers.

Small ideas don’t need permission. Bigger ideas need support, if they affect your team’s output or how it works with other teams. Or if they are risky.

A bigger idea will need support from your manager first, and then maybe from other groups it affects. And here is where it may hit trouble. You might be told that the idea doesn’t really fit the situation. You may be told that you need “big picture thinking”. You’ll be disappointed, maybe frustrated.

But the feedback could be fair. It could very well be that it’s not the right time for your idea, or at least that the idea needs to be changed. This post is about ideas that work overall or don’t.

Definition time: What’s an idea that works?

Decision-makers will back your idea if they think it will pay off enough relative to its costs.

Does that mean “it pays for itself”? As in, some new technical framework that will save a development team enough effort over a year to cover its cost? Probably not. That’s not enough. The costs are probably greater than you think, and it needs to pay off more to be interesting to managers.

Costs include:

• Any materials, licenses, etc, that you actually have to pay for.
• The effort spent
• The cost of not doing other things with that money and time. For example, if you could be doing something else that would pay five times more!
• The cost of adopting or promoting the new thing you have done. If it’s a product or product feature, how do buyers get to know it and want it? If it’s an internal process or tool, how do you get colleagues excited and trained?
• The potential cost of not doing something that supports other initiatives. Let’s say a product releases three features that work well with each other. It’s often easier to promote those than three unrelated features. And if they have common technical needs, it can be cheaper to build them together than do three unrelated things.
• The cost in terms of attention and focus — it is often easier to do fewer things well.

Payoffs include:

• The additional money that customers pay, or that the organization saves directly from your new thing.
• The other processes that get faster or easier as a result.
• The positive view of your company, product, or team that your innovation generates, which keeps customers loyal and will help you create more value in the future.
• The things that your team learns through doing this, that can create more value in the future.

These costs and benefits combine to make an idea worthwhile or not. An idea that costs very little to implement (in time/effort/attention/opportunity), doesn’t have to bring in a huge amount of extra benefit to make it worthwhile. But it still needs to bring in a high enough multiple of the costs.

So, what’s an idea that fits a situation, and one that doesn’t? Below I’m giving one example of each.

(By the way, this post isn’t about ideas that fit the situation fine but get rejected for other reasons, for example a bias against the person presenting them. Of course that is a real problem, just not the problem I am tackling in this post.)

An idea that fit the context

A phone manufacturer was known for technical innovation. People would buy their top-end phones to get new technologies first. They made the first phone with a conference-quality speaker, the first 4G one, the first phone with a 3D camera and screen, the first with decent GPS, and many other “firsts”.

The manufacturer had a very close partnership with the operating system providers. Those OSes came with good default apps, but the phone maker had software teams adding extra apps as well. The extra apps suited the customers well, because they added more sophisticated features, for music, photos, calendars, and several other areas.

But as the manufacturer grew, new users came along. They might have been given a phone as a gift, or just bought one because it looked the most powerful. These users weren’t all as curious or tech-savvy as the established user base, and they didn’t use the extra features as much. That was a risk, because the manufacturer’s investment in R&D was not all helping to keep and grow customers.

The manufacturer needed a way to let customers know what they were missing, in a way that would most encourage them to take action, to try out a new feature that they might appreciate.

One of the groups responsible for this kind of “user education” was … the User Education team. This team wrote all the end-user facing documentation and troubleshooting material, but had a brief to go beyond just helping people figure things out. This team was in Global Marketing, close to the people building the brand, and given a voice in shaping that brand too.

The team already had friendly how-to articles that users could access. It had made some short videos too, with great production values. (Unfortunately, my skills as a hand model were no longer needed, as the team now had a professional video team and actors.)

The team already had friendly how-to articles that users could access. It had made some short videos too, with great production values. But articles and videos were passive resources, that waited for users to access them. The team sought a way to recommend features to users contextually. If a user listened to music but wasn’t using the personalization features in the music app, they should get a tip to let them know what was available. Nothing too in-your-face, but a useful tip that could be tapped for more info, or dismissed if not wanted.

Contextual tips were needed too for the photos, calendar, contacts, and other apps. There would be more over time as new features were developed. The content of tips and their linked resources would change over time, and more tips would be needed. So the tips could not be written into the phone firmware — they had to be easily updated. (Every phone does this now, but then it was completely new.) But user behavior data could not be sent off the phone to make these tips work.

An idea took shape. A preinstalled app with tips that led to videos and neat how-to articles. One that kept user behavior data safe but synchronized the updated content via a data connection.

But the User Education team was not an engineering team. It built some automation tools and had some IT resources, but was not one of the official R&D teams that built the pre-installed apps on the phones. Nor could it just go ahead and build an app, without the skills, tools, and permissions.

If you know how organization structures usually work, you can see the potential challenge. This idea to build a tips app needed to go out of the Global Marketing organization. That meant of course that the idea had to be approved up a couple of levels within Marketing before bridging over to the Engineering organization.

But the idea had a smooth path through these channels. It made business sense. The chief marketing officer talked to the product leadership, who themselves liked the idea that their hard work would be promoted through contextual tips.

The User Ed team partnered with one of the in-house development teams, a product owner, and a designer, to jointly create the app. They worked within all the data security and synchronization constraints to do something new and useful. The engineers didn’t feel that the job of building the app had been “thrown over the wall” to them — the technical solutions came from everyone involved.

And once built into the new phones, the app got good use. (The team knew this from forums and an opt-in, anonymous data collection program.) At first, the team was disappointed that the app was used less than other apps, such as email. And then they realized that it was actually fine. Tips and user education are things you want to dip into briefly. How weird it would be to use them more than the actual productive functions of the phone!

The app came from an idea that worked in its situation. It fitted the big picture. In another situation, it wouldn’t have worked.

An idea that didn’t fit

From around the same time, here’s an idea that didn’t fit the big picture so well.

At some point while that app was still being planned, a team member came up with an idea for another app. 

It was the time when location-based services were new to smartphones. That is, satellite navigation and other location sources that could drive navigation and maps. Everyone was excited about the potential. A huge tech company who supplied the operating system had got into this area heavily, and on their maps app, had added a little game as well. A kind of VR game, chasing dots around the map. A kind of precursor to Pokémon Go.

The team member’s idea was to build a game where zombies chased you around the map. It would be pre-installed on the phones.

The game wasn’t a bad idea in itself. Zombies were fun, and the maps element was new. There had been other preinstalled games on the phones, though simpler ones. But how did the game fit with the other activities of the User Education team?

Remember that it was not an engineering team. The team member himself was not a developer or architect, so would not be able to contribute technically anyway. So one of the app engineering teams would have to prioritize this over other things they would be building, such as the advanced media and social features mentioned above. And there was no real connection to the core work of the User Education team, unlike the tips app.

The maps app already on most of the phones was provided with the operating system, and the phone manufacturer had no direct hand in building it. Also, it already came with a mini-game.

Perhaps if the game had been strongly aligned with the brand, the idea might have been interesting higher up in Global Marketing. But the zombies theme had none of the understated cool of the brand at the time, nor the zaniness of some campaigns that would come out shortly. If anything, zombies seemed a little cheesy.

There were actually some very cool map-based games on the horizon for smartphones, from Niantic Labs. First Ingress and then Pokémon Go. But that was Niantic’s whole business.

So this idea, though not terrible in itself, just didn’t have enough going for it. At least not enough to get the backing of the various leaders who would need to sponsor it. A really strategic idea brings together one or more existing capabilities or resources with a particular need that they suit. The zombie app had no such synergies.

How these examples could help you

You might think that the zombie app example is too obviously bad. But at the time, without the benefit of hindsight, it was no worse than many ideas that you and I have probably had for cool new stuff we could do. Actually, the team leaders were very happy that the colleague had taken the initiative to present the idea to them. But the key failings of the idea are common to many ideas that don’t fit the bigger picture. They seem cool in themselves. No-one would say they were terrible. But they just don’t address an important enough problem. The person with the idea may feel that it’s solving something very important, but when weighed against all the things that people could spend their time on, it just doesn’t make the priority list.

The other thing that can help an idea is if it costs little to implement, as I mentioned above. This can be hard to judge if you’re the idea-haver. There are big hidden costs in many ideas — costs of communicating and planning, of supporting long-term. Think of all the new technologies adopted that end up taking more effort than anyone banked on. But perhaps if an idea fits closely with other things being implemented at the same time, it can make the priority list still. Perhaps you can think of a few related software feature requests for which the underlying fix is the same — it then becomes easier to do them all at the same time, even if some are just nice-to-haves.

But if your aim is to be recognized as a strategic person — or if you just care about using scarce resources to best effect — then you need ideas that look more like the first one. They solve a problem that people will really appreciate the solving of. They make clever use of resources and they try not to challenge too many organizational dynamics. (The more challenge they present, the more valuable a problem they need to solve, and the better you need to be at communicating this!)

It’s hard to come up with an idea that fits the context in this way. But there is satisfaction in it too. It’s a truly creative thing. Amateur strategists need perfect circumstances for their ideas to work. Pros design for the current situation. That’s what you need to do, to make an impact.