3 Innovation Decision Traps That Kill Breakthrough Ideas (And How to Avoid Them)
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Release Date: 06/24/2025
How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You've got a decision you've been putting off. Maybe it's a career move. An investment. A difficult conversation you keep rehearsing in your head but never starting. You tell yourself you need more information. More data. More time to think. But you're not gathering information. You're hiding behind it. What looks like due diligence is actually overthinking in disguise. The certainty you're waiting for doesn't exist. It won't exist until after you decide and see what happens. I call this mindjacking: when something hijacks your ability to think for yourself. Sometimes it's external....
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Mindjacking - When your Opinions are Not Yours
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You've built a toolkit over the last several episodes. Logical reasoning. Causal thinking. Mental models. Serious intellectual firepower. Now the uncomfortable question: When's the last time you actually used it to make a decision? Not a decision you think you made. One where you evaluated the options yourself. Weighed the evidence. Formed your own conclusion. Here's what most of us do instead: we Google it, ask ChatGPT, go with whatever has the most stars. We feel like we're deciding, but we're not. We're just choosing which borrowed answer to accept. That gap between thinking you're deciding...
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CES 2026 - Battle of the AI Robots
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Welcome to this week's show. I'm recording this episode from my hotel room here in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show 2026. If you've been around this channel for long, you know I do this every year. This is 20-plus years I've been coming to the Consumer Electronics Show. Normally, I don't cover tech and new products on this channel—except for once a year at CES. And it's less about specific companies and what they've announced. You can find that on thousands of channels on YouTube or podcasts. What I like to talk about are the trends—the trends that are...
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Thinking 101: A Pause, A Reflection, And What Might Come Next
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Twenty-one years. That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story. After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and what doesn't. You learn not to get too attached because you never know what's going to connect. But this one surprised me. Thinking 101—the response has been different. More comments. More questions. More people saying, "This is exactly what I needed." It's made me reflect on why I started this series. Years ago, I was in a...
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Mental Models - Your Thinking Toolkit
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated the risk at closer to one in one hundred. A thousand times more dangerous than management believed.¹ Both groups had access to the same data. The same flight records. The same engineering reports. So how could their conclusions be off by a factor of a thousand? The answer isn't about...
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Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year, but millions of people are genuinely afraid of the ocean. Your brain can't do the math, so you worry about the wrong things and ignore the actual threats. And here's the kicker: The people selling you fear, products, and policies? They know your brain works this way....
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The Clock is Screaming
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead. That was surgery number one. By Thanksgiving this year, I’d had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months. And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude…...
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Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems (Thinking 101 - Ep 6)
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at spotting problems on their own. We're all making decisions like this right now. A solution fixes the immediate problem—but creates a second-order consequence that's harder to see and often more damaging than what we...
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Make Better Decisions When Nothing is Certain
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You're frozen. The deadline's approaching. You don't have all the data. Everyone wants certainty. You can't give it. Sound familiar? Maybe it's a hiring decision with three qualified candidates and red flags on each one. Or a product launch where the market research is mixed. Or a career pivot where you can't predict which path leads where. You want more information. More time. More certainty. But you're not going to get it. Meanwhile, a small group of professionals—poker players, venture capitalists, military strategists—consistently make better decisions than the rest of us in exactly...
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You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like a broken record. Every comparison you make—every single one—is your brain's way of understanding the world. You can't turn it off. When someone told you ChatGPT is "like having a smart assistant," your brain immediately knew what to expect—and what to worry about. When Netflix called itself "the HBO of streaming," investors understood the strategy instantly. These comparisons aren't just...
info_outlineEvery breakthrough innovation starts the same way: everyone thinks it's a terrible idea. Twitter was dismissed as "breakfast updates." Google looked "too simple." Facebook seemed limited to "just college kids."
Yet these "stupid ideas" became some of the biggest winners in tech history. After 30 years making innovation decisions at Fortune 100 companies, I've identified why smart people consistently miss breakthrough opportunities—and how to spot them before everyone else does.
Why Smart People Miss Breakthrough Ideas
The problem isn't intelligence or experience. It's that we ask the wrong questions when evaluating new innovations. We filter breakthrough ideas through frameworks designed for incremental improvements, not revolutionary changes.
Most innovation decisions fail because of three specific thinking traps that cause us to dismiss ideas with the highest potential for transformation.
The 3 Innovation Decision Traps
Trap #1: The Useless Filter
The Question That Kills Innovation: "What existing problem does this solve?"
Why It's Wrong: Breakthrough innovations don't solve existing problems—they create entirely new behaviors and meet needs people don't even know they have.
Real-World Example: Airbnb seemed insane when it launched. Staying with strangers? Seeing them in the kitchen? The "problem" it solved—expensive hotels—wasn't what made it revolutionary. It created an entirely new behavior: experiential travel that hotels couldn't provide.
The Better Question: "What new human behavior could this enable?"
Trap #2: The Simplicity Dismissal
The Question That Kills Innovation: "Where are all the features? This looks too basic."
Why It's Wrong: Simplicity isn't a lack of sophistication—it's the hardest thing to achieve. When something is designed to be insanely simple to use, that signals massive effort and thought behind the design.
Real-World Example: Google was just a white page with a search box while Yahoo crammed everything onto their homepage. Google looked unprofessional and incomplete, but it eliminated complexity everyone thought was necessary.
The Better Question: "What complexity is this eliminating?"
Trap #3: The Market Size Mistake
The Question That Kills Innovation: "How big is the addressable market? Why limit yourself so severely?"
Why It's Wrong: Breakthrough innovations don't serve existing markets—they create entirely new markets. The biggest opportunities come from ideas that seem too niche or focused.
Real-World Example: Facebook was just for college students requiring .edu email addresses. Critics said the market was too narrow. But social media users didn't exist before Facebook—the company created the entire market.
The Better Question: "What market could this create?"
The Innovation Decision Framework
When evaluating ideas that seem "stupid" or "too simple," use this three-question filter:
- What new behavior could this enable?
- What complexity could this eliminate?
- What market could this create?
These questions force you to look beyond surface-level problems and features to identify transformational potential.
How to Apply This Framework
For Investors: Stop asking "What problem does this solve?" Start asking "What behavior does this create?"
For Product Teams: Stop adding features. Start eliminating complexity.
For Leaders: Stop looking for big existing markets. Start looking for new market creation potential.
For Innovators: Stop following what everyone else thinks is smart. Start looking for ideas that violate conventional wisdom.
The Pattern Recognition Advantage
The current AI boom follows the exact same pattern as the dot-com bubble. Every company is racing to add AI to their pitch, just like they added ".com" in 1999.
But the real breakthrough opportunities? They're probably something completely different—ideas that look terrible to everyone following the AI herd.
The companies that will win are those that can recognize breakthrough potential when it violates everything the market thinks is smart.
The Courage to Act on "Stupid" Ideas
Recognition is only half the battle. The hardest part is having the courage to act on opportunities when they contradict expert opinion and market consensus.
The biggest question isn't whether you can spot these opportunities—it's whether you'll have the conviction to pursue them when everyone else thinks they're terrible ideas.
Because twenty years from now, someone will be writing about the "stupid idea" they missed in 2025 that became the next trillion-dollar company.
Want the Behind-the-Scenes Story?
This framework came from some painful (and expensive) lessons about dismissing breakthrough ideas. I share the full story—including how I wrote off the team that created Twitter after Apple destroyed their original business—in this week's Studio Notes.
Listen to the full analysis: Subscribe to the Killer Innovations podcast for deeper dives into innovation decision frameworks.
See the framework in action: Watch my case study of how these exact decision traps led to HP's $1.2 billion WebOS disaster.