3 Innovation Decision Traps That Kill Breakthrough Ideas (And How to Avoid Them)
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Release Date: 06/24/2025
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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_outline
How To Master Causal Thinking
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
$37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes. Three executives lost their jobs this month for making the same mistake. They presented data showing success after their initiatives were launched. Boards approved promotions. Then someone asked the one question nobody thought to ask: "Could something else...
info_outline
How to Improve Logical Reasoning Skills
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You see a headline: "Study Shows Coffee Drinkers Live Longer." You share it in 3 seconds flat. But here's what just happened—you confused correlation with causation, inductive observation with deductive proof, and you just became a vector for misinformation. Right now, millions of people are doing the exact same thing, spreading beliefs they think are facts, making decisions based on patterns that don't exist, all while feeling absolutely certain they're thinking clearly. We live in a world drowning in information—but starving for truth. Every day, you're presented with hundreds of...
info_outline
Why Thinking Skills Matter More Than Ever
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
The Crisis We're Not Talking About We're living through the greatest thinking crisis in human history—and most people don't even realize it's happening. Right now, AI generates your answers before you've finished asking the question. Search engines remember everything so you don't have to. Algorithms curate your reality, telling you what to think before you've had the chance to think for yourself. We've built the most sophisticated cognitive tools humanity has ever known, and in doing so, we've systematically dismantled our ability to use our own minds. A recent MIT study found that students...
info_outline
How to Build Innovation Skills Through Daily Journaling
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Most innovation leaders are performing someone else's version of innovation thinking. I've spent decades in this field. Worked with Fortune 100 companies. And here's what I see happening everywhere. Brilliant leaders following external frameworks. Copying methodologies from people they admire. Shifting their approach based on whatever's trendy. But they never develop their own innovation thinking skills. Today, I'd like to share a simple practice that has transformed my life. And I'll show you exactly how I do it. The Problem Here's what I see in corporate America. Leaders are reacting to...
info_outline
The WSJ Got Quarterly Reporting Wrong
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Michael Dell and his investors spent twenty-five billion dollars to buy back Dell Technologies. But they weren't really buying a company. They were buying freedom from quarterly earnings pressure. I'm Phil McKinney, former CTO of Hewlett-Packard, and I witnessed how this pressure shaped decisions for years. Today, we are exploring why the misses what actually happens inside corporate boardrooms. The Reality of Quarterly Pressure I want to show you what quarterly reporting actually looks like from the inside. Let me paint you a picture. It's week seven of the quarter, and you're in a...
info_outline
How to Get Smarter by Arguing with People who Disagree with You
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
What if I told you that the people who disagree with you are actually your secret weapon for better thinking? Just last month, my wife and I had a heated argument about studio changes I wanted to make here on the ranch. Her immediate reaction was about cost. Mine was about productivity and creativity. We were talking past each other completely. But when I applied what I'm about to teach you, we discovered we were both right—and found a solution that addressed both concerns without compromising either. What started as an argument became a session where each of us was heard and...
info_outline
How to See Opportunities Others Miss
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
In 2005, I had a ten-minute conversation at San Jose Airport that generated billions in revenue for HP. But here's what's fascinating: three other HP executives heard the exact same conversation and saw nothing special about it. If you read Monday's Studio Notes, you know this story from the emotional side—what it felt like to have that breakthrough moment, the internal resistance I faced, the personal transformation that followed. Today I'm delivering on my promise to give you the complete tactical methodology behind that insight. I'm going to show you the systematic framework I call...
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.