Do you know that point in a discussion about a new product, service or company when suddenly everybody gets excited and agrees that you should ‘just do it’?

‘This is sooo cool’
‘Yeah, you know what we should do? We should just do it!’
‘Yes! Lets do it’
‘Yeah, why not’
‘We could do it couldn’t we?!’
‘Yeah we could!’
‘Lets just totally do it!’

And that is about all that happens.
I will name it ‘The Consensus Hurdle’.

What happens is that everybody, on a conceptual level, feels great about something but nobody has a clue how to actually DO that thing you just decided to DO. Unless you move from the ‘Lets do this’ euphoria to the ‘This is what I will do’ phase you will be stuck in the high five-ing, patting on the back, ‘we are cool’ stage and never move beyond that.

Sounds logical? It always is. But a lot of people get stuck at ‘The Consensus Hurdle’. You can recognize them because they are usually the same people who will say ‘But I invented that!’ when someone else launches or sells a company based on this idea. They didn’t actually invent anything, they just said ‘we should do this’ and never did.

One way to measure the innovativeness of your concept is to see how much tension and friction it generates. In physics change always causes friction. So if your ideas don’t generate friction they aren’t changing much which means they aren’t very innovative.

If you present a new idea and everybody just yells ‘Yeah, we should do that’ you should rethink it.

“The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”
— P. B. Medawar