I’m a fan of planning. I’m a fan of strategy. They’re absolutely essential in this business.
But there’s a side to me that bucks and chafes at limitation. Inevitably, there’s a lot of good stuff that simply won’t fit into a well-laid strategy. However, there are times when a bit of that good stuff really is too good to throw away.
There are a few instances when I’ve had an also-ran idea that didn’t really fit the core strategy and served a different yet arguably important objective. Just things that came up in the course of doing a thorough job. We should always make a place for those types of ideas. I like to call them bend to fit.
Bend to fit ideas are the cool, weird stuff that we should all be sandboxing and trying out. Try it in a pilot market. Give it a tiny bit of funding. If they flop, there’s not much to lose. If they soar, you’ve just proved something has merit in real-world market testing. Good times.
We should all leave a little wiggle room in our budgets and our thinking for the bend-to-fit ideas. They’re worth exploring.
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