Video Summary: Our approach to innovation is dead wrong | Diana Kander TEDxKC

Diana said that even though she was a great Taekwondo student with a green belt, the moment she faced real danger where a stranger grabbed her from her throat she got paralyzed and couldn’t do anything about it.

Diana realized that her training wasn’t preparing her for real life fights, but was preparing her to score points. During training, she used to play against young girls and punches in the face weren’t allowed. She realized that those rules were very different from the rules of a real fight.

Diana said that many business classes don’t really prepare people to face the real world. She cited a study where the number of business classes were increasing over the years, but the number of successful businesses were decreasing.

Diana said that most of these courses teach people the same exact steps. To find a great idea, to write a business plan, to get funding from family and friends then wait for sales to come. She then mentioned Mike Tyson’s quote ‘Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face’.

Diana said that MBA’s always perform much worse than others on the famous marshmallow challenge where people are expected to built a structure out of sticks of spaghetti and a yard tape then place a piece of marshmallow on top without the structure falling.

Diana said that MBA’s take 30% of the time to plan the structure, 60% of the time to build it and only 10 percent to do the most important step, which is deploying the marshmallow. She said that they don’t give themselves any time to change their plans if anything went wrong.

Diana said that kindergartners went directly to experimenting by building a small structure than placing the marshmallow on top immediately. Then they try another taller structure and see if it will work. She said that kindergartners try 5 different structures before MBA’s complete their first one.

Diana said that the kindergartners always outperformed MBA’s simply because they didn’t waste their time planning. They just started interacting directly with the problem. And because problems can’t be solved from the first attempt, kindergartners always had a bigger chance to succeed. (See Video Summary: Overcoming Hopelessness by Nick Vujicic l TEDx Novi Sad)

Diana then talked about a software project she started with a very big vision, but failed because of the same reason. She and her team spent a very long time planning for the project, got half a million in funding and executed it perfectly only to discover that people didn’t like the idea.

Diana said that she believes that it’s much better to teach students how to interact with the real world and to experiment as fast as they can instead of spending a very long time on planning. (See Video Summary: What explains the rise of humans? By Yuval Noah Harari)

Diana asked her students to distribute five 1-dollar-bills on 5 different people. She asked them to write a plan first then to execute. The results showed that even distributing free money doesn’t work as planned because some people are busy, others are skeptical…etc.

Diana said that people must learn to test the market fast to get evidence that their product is going to work. She said that making assumptions about customers is a big mistake, and for a product to succeed, evidence must be collected by direct interaction with customers.