The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones. While we need divergence from the norm to make progress, not all divergence is advantageous. To be successful, it’s not enough to do something dif

The problem, as many of these players discovered, is that most of their “original” concepts were rare for good reason. The virtue of innovation only rarely compensates for the vice of inadequacy.

“Early on, some things will work, and some things won’t, but you have to pay attention to what your audience is telling you they want,” Camille said. “Your goal is to identify these ‘value payloads,’ or outlier successes that you can use to learn from and use to inform the rest of your work.”