New ventures pour their hearts and souls into developing solutions which will appeal to existing or emerging markets and result in returns on entrepreneurial investments. Yet betting on the wrong horse while in this pursuit can also consume precious limited resources on vague problem statements or unproven ideas.

In order for businesses to make good investments, their endeavors must be based upon a clear set of goals that are consistent with the organization's business model, and will provide 'bang for the buck' for enough customers. This requires a focus on challenges and business scenarios that are most likely to deliver the highest return in the shortest period of time -  typically within time frames that are measured in months rather than years.

Abstract, notional project objectives are the predominant cause of failure in execution. This phenomenon occurs so frequently in engineering new products that it is woven into the fabric of solution providers, who nearly always adopt the classic commitment hedge "the devil is in the details'. These solution developers understandably want to provide their best face to decision-makers, and typically seek to offer enticing sound bites as bait for funding and sponsorship. Yet unless there are enough credible customers willing to roll up their sleeves and invest enough of their own key resources in the necessary and messy details of solution development, it is entirely too easy for organizations to waste precious time and resources solving the wrong problem, or delivering solutions which do not provide the required utility to future customers.

Finding a path to success requires both a sustained commitment to the pursuit of value, and regular demonstrations that the way forward is affordable, feasible, and worthwhile. The velocity and direction required to navigate to an acceptable solution nearly always requires cycles of trial and error. This process is another name for the variation and selection we see in evolution, and which makes the creation of new things both challenging and rewarding. The search for the pathways to better solutions requires product managers and technical leaders to challenge the status quo, embrace change, and accept that required standards are usually dependent upon the context in which they operate - a reality that may not fit will with the conflicting demands for speed and quality in businesses. This reality is not popular, since it means that simple and universal solutions may not always be appropriate or achievable, and requires us to embrace the variation which naturally arises, and often causes problems in fielding or using version one products. Ironically, it is this variation and refinement that is also the source for most really great ideas.

In the book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Harford identifies the most common pitfall that organizations can fall into in embracing trial and error in evaluating business opportunities: 

To move forward, endeavors must substantiate that perceived problems are real and that solutions are achievable within available resources, and are capable of displacing incumbents. Since the path from problems to solutions is rarely straightforward, we must also remember this path is unlikely to be traversed in a single jump.  

As a result, small batch sizes, small experiments, and small demonstrations are essential before major commitments, as they provide more immediate feedback, and thus enable more frequent course corrections. To visualize how this works, consider two separate efforts that are each in pursuit of the same target. These two efforts are depicted by the two vectors on the diagram on the right. In the real world, such targets change with time - sometimes as a result of changes in environments, and sometimes as a result of refinements in understanding these environments. These changes are depicted in this figure by a change in the location of the target. Our first effort, shown in the gray arrow, represents projects which utilize large batch sizes that take long to produce. The second approach depicts an effort which instead uses a smaller batch size, which are about one third of that used in the first approach. Both of these efforts, like real projects, have constraints on how much change can be incorporated into each iteration, but we'll let the large batch size project change its direction at twice the rate as the smaller batch size approach, in this example. This is meant to indicate that if you don't get it right the first time, you are worried about the sunk costs, and often can over-compensate in your second batch.

After the two approaches have both traveled equal distances (which involves 2 iterations for the gray arrows, and 6 iterations for the brown arrows), we can evaluate the remaining distance that each of these paths has to reach the target. As shown, the approach employing the small batch size is 30% closer to the target than the large batch size approach.

In a real project, progress is rarely as simple as that depicted in either of these approaches. Simplistic ideas offered up to solve complex problems may have broad appeal, but solutions are usually much more complicated than were originally envisioned to be. The path which projects take from point A to point B is a voyage of discovery. Pitfalls block many paths, and it is not uncommon to have to retrace your steps. In such environments, it is foolish to embark on such a potentially hazardous journey unless you have verified that you will have sufficient resources to survive. To secure these commitments for required resources, sufficient benefits must be identified from collaborative, iterative efforts so that fledging businesses can evolve their own targets and maps of the terrain, and so the gap between perceived customer needs and economically realizable solutions becomes a step of faith, rather than a leap. 

In short, achieving change in organizational systems is much more complicated than we hope or understand, and delivering results on a fixed schedule is about as likely as predicting earthquakes. Since everything in such systems is connected through people, processes tools, and resources, the complexity and the interactions of these system components take longer and more resources than we hope when the concepts are described in the original marketing pitches. As a result, investments often provide less benefit than was originally hoped for, and may easily result in losing money overall. Yet to an optimistic solution developer, all of these constraints can be overcome, with enough commitment and perseverance.

Solution developers must realize that it is only by working together with potential customers that they can probe into gaps, and understand the terrain that users must confront, so these gaps can be adequately understood, properly evaluated, and realistically tackled. This partnership is critical to discover answers to the following questions, each of which are critical to selecting and developing the best possible opportunities into solutions that will produce results with the highest value.