Ed Ipser gave a great mini-workshop on Pivots and Turnarounds at a recent Lean Culture Online Event. Here is a summary.
Ed Ipser on Pivots and Turnarounds
Instagram didn’t start out as Instagram. It started out as Burbn, an iPhone app for sharing bourbon lovers to socialize and share photos of their bourbon. But when the app failed to get the traction that the founders wanted they made a crucial pivot to focus on their photo sharing features. And the rest is history.
Every failed business is a failure to pivot or turnaround while it still had time and resources to do so.
Your biggest opportunity lies on the other side of your fears
“Everybody wants to put on a happy face and not discourage others or even themselves because it’s really frustrating to recognize that you need to change. But your biggest possibilities lie on the other side of your fears.”
Lean Canvas as a Brainstorming Tool
When you realize you’ve got problems, when you get these fears in the pit of your stomach, that’s when you think we need to make a change here. Having these plans written down in your canvas as alternatives and possibilities gives you the confidence to move forward.
Pivots & Investor Commitments
Sean Murphy & Ed Ipser talk about investor commitments and pivots.
Pivots and Turnarounds – full presentation by Ed Ipser
Links to the exercises
- Face your fears
- Business Inventory
- Lean Startup Canvas
- Business Model Canvas
- Slides –Coming Soon!
More About the Speaker
Edward A. Ipser, Jr., PhD is President of IpserLab, LLC, a startup foundry and Managing Partner at Coactify, a creative pivot and turnaround consultancy. He has founded, cofounded, joined, and advised many startups. As founder of MarketFusion he raised $23M in venture capital. He also founded SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of Software Entrepreneurs) in 1996 which became the premier Silicon Valley entrepreneurial organization before merging into SVForum. He received a PhD in Computer Science from USC.
SKMurphy Take
I think Ed’s workshop offers a valuable approach for three crucial aspects of determining if and when to pivot:
- Confronting Your Fears forces you to make an explicit model or set of predictions about the future.
I resisted this initially but now believe that offers a helpful method to capture your unstated assumptions and unexamined premises, similar to Samula Mescher‘s “Invite Your Fear to Tea.” This exercise could also be extended to include Premortems and drafting Decision Records. - Lean Canvas offers a template for making an explicit model for the current “system of the business.”
I don’t think that all of the boxes in the Lean Canvas are created equal when it comes to impact on the business model: Problem, Solution, and Customer are clearly more important. But it still gives you a framework to track changes. A directed graph model like the Disney business model map (see this HBR article https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st for an example) may prove more flexible. - The Business Inventory offers a clear picture of assets, liabilities, and obligations that includes financial items and commitments to partners and customers.
SKMurphy has been talking about financial, intellectual, and social assets coupled with traction since a 2007 talk on startups Technology Ventures. Ed explicitly builds on an approach we documented in “Working Capital: It Takes More than Money” to propose a richer model with better utility. Casting it as a “balance sheet” that includes assets and commitments, and obligations (in particular tracking commitments to customers and partners) is a clear improvement.
I think Ed has advanced the state of the art for analyzing when and where to change your startup’s approach to the market.
Related Blog Posts
- Q: How Do I Plan for Pivots or Even Shutting Down My Startup?
- Good and Bad Reasons to Pivot
- Overnight Success
- Adeo Ressi: Don’t Lose Your Purpose In A Pivot
Postscript: Invite Your Fear to Tea by Samula Mescher
What do you do when you feel fear? Try to ignore it, suppress it, push it away? What if instead you invited your fear to tea? What if you had a chat with your fear to get to know your fear better?
Contrary to what you might think: moving towards your fear actually will diminish the power of your fear. Whereas ignoring, suppressing, pushing away will make the fear larger and more powerful.
So move closer, invite your fear to tea and have a conversation with your Fear.
Just ask your fear: what are you afraid of? Maybe Fear answers: “ I am afraid my presentation will be really bad.” Then ask more questions.You can take this conversation with Fear in two directions.
Direction A: Let Fear tell you the whole scenario including its worst ending.
Ok suppose the presentation is bad. What will happen then? “Then my supervisor will think I don’t have what it takes” And what will happen next? “Then my contract will not be renewed. And what will happen next? “Then I will be out of a job. “Now you will be able to see the ridiculousness of some of the doom scenarios Fear comes up with. Will you lose your job over one bad presentation?
Also prepare for the worst. What can you do when you find yourself out of a job? Your answer might be: Well I have some savings, I will get unemployment benefits, so this will give me time and income to look for a new job. Following your Fear to the endgame will diminish your fears!
Conversation B: Dive into the details.
Get up close and personal. Up close and personal Fear loses much of its ominous power.
Ask Fear what a bad presentation will look like? When you really get to know the details of what Fear is afraid of, it is much easier to come up with ideas, solutions that will help you. Maybe it is about being clumsy with technical stuff, maybe it is about the content of the presentation, maybe it is about being afraid to talk too fast. Do you already have ideas coming up what would help in each of these scenario’s ? You probably do! By getting closer Fear changes from this ominous big undefined thing, to something clear and specific. Something concrete to work with.So when Fear comes to visit this week, invite Fear to tea and get to know Fear better!
Oh, by the way: the goal is NOT to get rid of fear. The goal is to change your relationship to fear. And by changing your relationship to fear, fear will hold less power over you.
Mon-Jun-23-2025: I have included it here because it’s very insightful and it’s no longer available on Mescher’s website or anywhere else I can find on the Internet except for the Wayback machine. See “How Doom Scenarios can be Helpful” by Samula Mescher and my blog post “Constructive Pessimism” for related insights. (Update Sep-1-2024: it’s now back at https://samulamescher.com/invite-your-fear-to-tea/)