Startup Pivoting & Shadow Beliefs

Startup Pivoting

At the Startup Lessons Learned conference last week, there was much ado about Pivoting. As Alan Cooper says in his post To Pivot, Or Not To Pivot,

When a startup company discards Plan A and moves on to Plan B, it is called a “pivot.”

When I hear Pivot, I recall my physical education teacher screaming at me not to scuff the gym floor with my "street shoes" when I

put my right foot in...
dancing the Hokey-Pokey.

Pivoting for startups is moving incrementally toward something better - a better business model.

Pivoting is like the iterative numerical methods we used in college programming classes. You’d start with a seed value, chunk along for a bit, and then check your convergence. With enough constraints and suitable convergence criteria, convergence was almost guaranteed. Occasionally an anomaly would unravel your code into memory consuming divergence, but hopefully you programmed a check for that condition before you smoked your 256KB.

Shadow Beliefs

Shadow Lines by Abdulla Zaid

One of the things I heard from Startup Lessons Learned conference organizer Eric Ries is the term Shadow Beliefs. These are the closely held (perhaps subconscious), somewhat notional beliefs (and false assumptions) that frequently sink good-intentioned entrepreneurs and insidiously swamp the best agile software teams.

All of us fall somewhere in the continuum of delusion, particularly those under the spell of a great startup idea or a cool software product.

Do we believe we know what the customer wants?

A common shadow belief is

We know what the customer wants. 

Cooper, a digital product and interaction design firm, founded in 1992 by Alan Cooper, is a leader in discovering what users want. Most of us think we know what the customer wants, few of us do.

Do we believe that advancing the plan is progress?

Another shadow belief is

Advancing the plan is progress. 

This is a single-line indictment of dogmatically Agile software teams that harkens back to the Discovery vs. Delivery discussions at Code Freeze 2010: Redesigning Agility. Some time before the Code Freeze conference he organized, 2009 Gordon Pask Award Winner David Hussman tweeted,

If you don't know where you are going, it's easy to iteratively not get there.

This shadow belief is an even bigger pothole for startups than software development teams.