Your Company is an Idea-Killing Machine...Which is Good

Your mature company is built to kill ideas. That's normal and necessary for survival. How do you know you're killing the right ideas?

When you are first creating a new company, you have to cast wide opportunity net. You must try different approaches, test various markets, and pivot freely. As you mature and find your lane, you must create efficiencies by developing essential idea-killing muscles:

"We're a fried chicken company, we can't do fish."

"We're a services company, we can't build products."

A company chasing every idea will fail quickly.

Here's the problem: in their infancy, a wasteful distraction and a groundbreaking innovation look identical. Your company's idea-killing machine can't tell them apart. That's because your company is literally built to find these early-stage ideas and eliminate them. They represent waste, distraction, and inefficiency. In fact, the more efficient and focused your company becomes, the better you are at killing ideas.

Brilliant ideas, in their infancy, need protection from your company.

Imagine having a literal handful of seeds. They are a mix of radish and wild mustard. At the seed stage, they're identical: small, round, reddish-brown specks. If I asked you to remove the wild mustard seeds now, you couldn't. These seeds need to germinate, grow their first true leaves, and mature before you can identify which is which.

Your team's ideas are like these seeds. In their infancy, groundbreaking innovations and wasteful distractions look identical. Your company's idea-killing machine can't tell them apart. That's because your company is built to find these early-stage ideas and eliminate them as they represent potential waste, distraction, and inefficiency. Like seeds needing time to show their true nature, brilliant ideas need protection in their early stages.

What's needed isn't to turn off your idea-killing machine. Doing that would bury any company quickly. Instead, you need a better filter. A way to protect and test promising ideas in a controlled sandbox, gathering real data before the machine kicks in.

That's where Forks come in. They create safe spaces for ideas to prove their worth through small, contained tests. Your team can quickly assess, with tangible data, which ideas deserve to "live another day."

Don't stop killing ideas. Just make sure you're killing the right ones.