Why Good Ideas Sometimes Go Nowhere
Francis E. Madojemu
You have probably experienced this.
You say something for years and very little happens.
Then somebody better known says something remarkably similar and suddenly everybody is quoting it.
Or you develop something you genuinely believe is useful. You have thought it through. It solves a real problem. You put it out there.
Silence.
Meanwhile something you consider shallower, less useful or even badly thought through seems to travel everywhere.
It is tempting to conclude that people simply do not recognise quality anymore.
That may occasionally be true.
But there is another possibility worth considering.
Perhaps people have not rejected your idea. Perhaps they have hardly encountered it.
They encountered the headline.
The person saying it.
The platform.
The reputation.
The design.
The first thirty seconds.
The context.
The evidence—or absence of evidence—around it.
They encountered the frame before they got anywhere near the picture.
That distinction may explain far more than we realise.
BEING RIGHT AND BEING HEARD ARE TWO DIFFERENT PROBLEMS
One statement from a recent conversation between Chris Williamson and Alex Hormozi caught my attention:
“Until you win, effort always goes unnoticed.”
There is some deliberate exaggeration in the statement, but almost anyone who has tried to build something recognises the experience behind it.
Before something succeeds, you often have to explain yourself.
After it succeeds, other people explain your brilliance for you.
An idea that once looked strange becomes innovative.
Stubbornness becomes conviction.
An unnecessary experiment becomes foresight.
Success did not necessarily change what happened.
It changed the frame through which people interpreted what happened.
That presents a difficult lesson for those of us who put enormous emphasis on getting the idea right:
Being right and being heard are not the same achievement.
You can solve the first problem and completely fail at the second.
That doesn’t reduce the importance of truth. It simply means truth has to travel through human beings, and human beings do not encounter ideas in laboratory conditions.
We receive them with limited time, previous experiences, prejudices, expectations and questions about whom we can trust.
Before I seriously examine what you are saying, I am already asking, often unconsciously:
Why should I listen to you?
Why should this matter to me?
Has this worked anywhere?
What problem does this solve?
Is this worth my time?
That may not always seem fair.
But it is real.
WHY THE SAME IDEA SOUNDS DIFFERENT FROM SOMEONE ELSE
Suppose an unknown investor tells you to avoid chasing short-term excitement and think patiently over decades.
Good advice perhaps.
Now imagine Warren Buffett saying essentially the same thing.
The words may barely change. Your response probably does.
Why?
Not because truth changes according to the speaker.
Buffett’s history has supplied a context for hearing him.
His track record does some work before his sentence begins.
That is one reason established people appear to receive attention so easily. They are not sending naked messages. Their previous results travel with them.
Researchers studying prestige and social learning have found that people use reputation and the attention of others as shortcuts when deciding whom to learn from.
We have to.
There is simply too much information in the world for every claim to be investigated from the beginning.
The difficulty comes when we mistake this shortcut for proof.
A famous person can still be wrong.
An unknown person can still see something everyone else has missed.
Prestige affects attention.
It does not determine truth.
That difference is critical.
PERHAPS YOUR IDEA DOES NOT HAVE AN IDEA PROBLEM
This is where the matter becomes useful rather than merely interesting.
When something we have developed receives little response, the instinct is often to change the thing itself.
Change the product.
Change the programme.
Change the message.
Change the idea.
Start something new.
But perhaps the first investigation should be wider.
Maybe people do not understand what problem it solves.
Maybe the language makes sense to you because you have lived with the idea for two years, but it means almost nothing to someone meeting it for two minutes.
Maybe you are describing its features when people are trying to understand why they need it.
Maybe you are offering aspiration when their immediate concern is survival.
Maybe you are making claims when what they need is demonstration.
Maybe the person delivering the message does not yet have enough credibility.
Maybe the format asks for twenty minutes from someone who has not yet been given a reason to give you two.
Maybe you have a good picture in the wrong frame.
That deserves investigation before you repaint the picture.
THE FRAME IS ALREADY TALKING
Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” was much larger than a discussion about choosing between television and radio.
His argument was that media change the environment in which communication happens.
The railway did more than carry the same passengers faster. It changed where people could live, where businesses could operate and how distance itself was experienced.
The smartphone did not simply improve the telephone. It altered photography, banking, navigation, entertainment, shopping, news and human relationships.
The container changes what becomes possible around the content.
Something similar happens at a smaller level every time we communicate.
Imagine an unsigned painting leaning against a wall at a roadside market.
Now imagine exactly the same painting properly mounted and illuminated in an important gallery.
Nothing has happened to the paint.
But something has happened to you.
You probably stand differently.
Look longer.
Assume there may be something worth discovering.
Perhaps read the plaque.
Perhaps look again at something you would have walked past five minutes earlier.
The gallery did not make a bad painting good.
It created a context in which you were prepared to look.
That is what frames do.
And our messages have frames whether we design them deliberately or not.
BEFORE THE MESSAGE COMES THE QUESTION: WHY SHOULD I CARE?
This is where Myron Golden’s argument about pain becomes particularly interesting.
He compares two ways of saying essentially the same thing.
“Seven Steps to Seven Figures.”
And:
“The Seven Biggest Mistakes Keeping Entrepreneurs from Seven Figures.”
The destination has not really changed.
The frame has.
In the first version, you are offering me a future I may not believe you can deliver.
In the second, you are helping me understand a problem I already know I have.
Myron’s point is that people are often more willing to trust a stranger to help them move away from recognisable pain than to trust that stranger to move them towards promised pleasure.
That explains something beyond marketing.
The pain answers the question:
Why should I pay attention to this now?
If I already know something is hurting, failing, costing me money, damaging a relationship or keeping me awake, you do not first have to persuade me that the subject matters.
The problem has done that work.
This does not mean every message should become frightening.
And it certainly does not give us permission to manufacture anxiety so that frightened people will buy what we are selling.
It means something simpler:
Start where the person actually is.
ARE YOU TELLING YOUR STORY OR HELPING ME WITH MINE?
Myron says something else that initially sounds almost offensive:
Nobody cares about your story.
Of course that cannot be literally true. Human beings love stories.
His real point is more useful.
People do not owe your story attention merely because it happened to you.
They are listening for the connection to their own lives.
Your failure becomes valuable when it helps me avoid something.
Your experience becomes valuable when it helps me interpret mine.
Your discovery becomes valuable when it helps me solve a problem.
Your testimony becomes valuable when it helps me see a possibility I could not see before.
Myron’s formulation is that people are interested in how you can help fix their story.
That is an uncomfortable question for writers, preachers, teachers, leaders and businesses:
Whose story are we really telling?
It is quite possible to produce intelligent material that is almost entirely organised around what the communicator wants to say.
We call it communication because words left us.
But did they arrive anywhere?
That is another matter.
GOOD NEWS IS ONLY GOOD NEWS IN RELATION TO SOMETHING
There is a much bigger theological question here that deserves its own treatment, so I will not attempt to resolve it in this article.
But it is difficult not to notice the connection.
“Good news” is relational language.
News is good because something has happened in relation to a condition that existed before it.
Rescue means little to someone who does not understand the danger.
Freedom means something in relation to bondage.
Forgiveness becomes astonishing when guilt is understood.
Healing makes sense when sickness is recognised.
Rest sounds different to someone who knows they are weary.
This is one reason Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11 does not begin with an abstract promise of an improved spiritual life.
He speaks to people who “labour and are heavy laden.”
The invitation meets a condition.
There is far more to examine here, particularly regarding how the Gospel is communicated without turning sin, judgment and human brokenness into manipulative fear.
That deserves a separate article.
But for now the communication lesson is enough:
People understand an answer more clearly when they understand the question it answers.
THE DANGER OF LEARNING THIS TOO WELL
Once you understand that pain attracts attention and frames influence perception, something dangerous becomes possible.
You can manufacture the wound.
Exaggerate the threat.
Make people feel inadequate.
Create an enemy.
Increase the fear.
Then present yourself as the solution.
We see this everywhere.
The fact that a technique works does not make it right.
A good frame should help someone see reality more clearly.
A manipulative frame alters reality so that the communicator gets the response he wants.
That distinction matters enormously to me, particularly in ministry.
There is no virtue in boring people unnecessarily.
But there is also no justification for manipulating them efficiently.
Communication has to serve truth.
Not replace it.
THE OTHER PROBLEM: PROOF
There is still another reason good ideas struggle.
Sometimes the audience understands the claim perfectly.
They simply have no reason to believe it yet.
This is where many new ideas are particularly vulnerable.
The founder has spent months thinking about the concept. In his mind, the connections are obvious.
The audience sees none of that.
They see an assertion.
“This works.”
“This will transform the industry.”
“This is different.”
“This is better.”
Perhaps.
But where is the evidence?
This is why demonstration matters.
Why testimonials matter when they are genuine.
Why prototypes matter.
Why results matter.
Why experience matters.
Why sometimes you simply have to keep doing the work until reality begins to provide evidence that language alone cannot supply.
You cannot frame your way out of the absence of proof forever.
Eventually the picture has to survive inspection.
FOUR DIFFERENT PROBLEMS THAT WE KEEP CONFUSING
I have begun to find a simple distinction helpful.
When an idea is struggling, ask which problem you actually have.
Is it true?
That is the truth problem.
Why should I care?
That is the relevance problem.
Why should I believe you?
That is the proof problem.
Why am I not encountering or understanding it?
That is the transmission problem.
Those four questions save us from treating every failure as the same kind of failure.
Sometimes the idea really is bad.
That happens.
Sometimes the idea is good but solves something nobody particularly cares about.
Sometimes the need is real, but we have not demonstrated that our answer works.
And sometimes all of those things are present, but our communication prevents people from discovering them.
You cannot fix all four with better marketing.
Nor can you fix all four by stubbornly insisting that the idea is brilliant.
You have to diagnose the right problem.
THIS HAS BEGUN TO CHANGE HOW I LOOK AT THINGS WE ARE BUILDING
I want to be cautious here because there is another trap writers fall into.
We have an idea today and write about it tomorrow as though it has already become a proven case study.
It hasn’t.
A hypothesis is not evidence.
I am currently involved in experiments where this thinking is beginning to affect design, but the experiments still have to meet reality.
One is Market Day Live.
We are asking whether sellers who normally make claims about their products can benefit from an environment where customers can actually watch them demonstrate, explain, answer questions and transact.
It is tempting to declare that this will turn claims into evidence.
Perhaps it will.
But that is the hypothesis.
We still have to see what customers do.
Do they trust the product more?
Do demonstrations change buying behaviour?
What happens to enquiries?
What happens to conversion?
What happens when moments from the live event become content afterward?
We need results before we turn the language of possibility into the language of proof.
Another experiment is an anniversary programme we are calling Chapters of Grace.
Instead of simply moving from singer to singer, we are exploring a structure in which story creates the context for song:
THE WORD • THE STORY • THE SONG • THE WORSHIP.
The thought is that hearing someone’s story before hearing the song connected with it may change the way the audience receives the song.
That seems reasonable.
But we have not yet done it.
So it belongs here not as evidence for the argument but as evidence that the argument is beginning to alter how we design.
There is an important difference.
SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO STOP SAYING IT THE SAME WAY
There is one final lesson in that Williamson-Hormozi conversation that I find personally challenging.
If you believe something is true, there is value in continuing to say it when nobody is listening.
Many worthwhile ideas require persistence.
But there is a difference between persistence and repetition.
If I have been saying the same thing for ten years and people consistently fail to understand it, perhaps faithfulness does not require an eleventh year of exactly the same explanation.
Maybe the idea stays.
The explanation changes.
Maybe the conviction stays.
The example changes.
Maybe the truth stays.
The medium changes.
Otherwise we can turn failure to communicate into a badge of honour.
“They don’t understand.”
Perhaps.
But perhaps I have not yet learned to explain.
That possibility is worth keeping open.
BEFORE YOU THROW THE IDEA AWAY
So if you have something you believe should be working and it isn’t, do not immediately conclude that the world is foolish.
And do not immediately conclude that your idea is worthless.
Look again.
Is there really a problem worth solving?
Have you started with that problem or with your enthusiasm for your solution?
Does the person you want to reach recognise themselves anywhere in what you are saying?
Have you provided evidence or merely enthusiasm?
Does the title help them understand why they should care?
Is the messenger carrying enough credibility?
Does the medium fit the message?
Have you asked too much attention before earning a little?
And, hardest of all:
Have you fallen in love with your picture while ignoring the frame in which everyone else is seeing it?
Sometimes you really do need another picture.
But not always.
Sometimes the work is already good.
The idea is sound.
The problem is real.
The value is there.
People just cannot see it yet.
Before you paint another picture, look carefully at the frame.
Francis E. Madojemu
THINK • BUILD • PERSONALIZE
