Tag: innovation

Escaping the Urgent: Why Immediate Demands Are Killing Your Future Growth

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

You start every quarter with a bold intention: this is the quarter we finally make traction on our future-proofing initiatives. You have a list of strategic bets that will open new markets and secure the company’s longevity. But then Monday morning hits. A legacy server goes down. A key client requires an immediate bespoke feature update. The sales team needs support to close the quarter. Slowly but surely, the “tyranny of the urgent” takes over. By the time the quarter ends, your team is exhausted from keeping the lights on, and those critical strategic bets haven’t moved an inch. You are surviving today, but you are mortgaging tomorrow.

The Hidden Costs of an Unbalanced Portfolio

When your portfolio is heavily weighted toward immediate demands at the expense of long-term strategy, you aren’t just delaying innovation; you are actively degrading your competitive advantage.

  • Innovation Starvation: While you pour resources into maintaining the status quo, your competitors are building the disruption that will make your core business obsolete.
  • Legacy Anchors: Without a strategy for “Horizon 0” (retiring systems), you continue to fund low-value work and legacy debt, draining the budget needed for growth.
  • Economic Sub-Optimization: By saying “yes” to every urgent request, you dilute your focus. You end up with a traffic jam of good ideas, but very few great outcomes actually getting delivered to the market.

A Glimpse of the Solution

The answer isn’t just “working harder”—it is implementing the Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency. This component of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) moves you away from reacting to fire drills and toward intentional Horizon Planning. By visualizing your work through a Portfolio Kanban, you can actively manage the flow of value across different horizons:

  • Horizon 1: Extending your core business.
  • Horizon 2: Growing emerging value.
  • Horizon 3: Placing future bets.
  • Horizon 0: Retiring what no longer serves you. This framework empowers Portfolio Leaders to make data-driven “Go/No-Go” decisions, ensuring you are allocating capacity to the future, not just the present.

Your First Step

You can do a quick assessment of your portfolio’s health this week. Review the last 10 significant initiatives or Epics where your portfolio has made significant progress in delivering. 

If 90% or more of your investment is sitting in Horizon 1 (Core), your portfolio may not be balanced for the future. 

You are optimizing for safety today at the risk of irrelevance tomorrow.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Recognizing the imbalance is the start; fixing it requires a systemic approach. The Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency provides the tools to implement Horizon Planning, visualize flow with Kanbans, and use economic prioritization to make the hard choices easier.

Stop letting the urgent crowd out the important.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework to build a portfolio that delivers today while securing your future. Get access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

Get Started

In this Series:

¹ Moore, Geoffrey. Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. Diversion Books, 2015.

Betting the Business on a Guess: When “Good Ideas” Waste Millions

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Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.

It’s the annual planning meeting, and the star project is unveiled—a massive digital transformation, a new product line, a major platform overhaul. It has executive backing, a compelling narrative, and a huge budget. Everyone nods; it feels right. The entire organization begins to mobilize, committing months, or even years, of effort to this single, big bet.

But deep down, a quiet question lingers: “How do we know this is what customers actually want?” Too often, the answer is, “We just do.” You’re building what you think the market needs, hoping your intuition pays off, all while precious resources are poured into an unvalidated future.

The Hidden Costs of Unvalidated Bets

When an investment is based on an unvalidated assumption—even a “really good” one—the cost isn’t just the initial budget. It’s a cascade of failures that silently drain your organization’s potential and can lead to significant financial losses.

  • Wasted Capacity: Entire departments spend months building a complex solution that customers don’t adopt, leading to 100% opportunity cost. That’s time and talent you will never get back, delaying other potentially valuable initiatives.
  • Delayed Value & Diminished Competitive Advantage: While you’re busy building the wrong thing, your competitors are capturing market share by solving the real customer problem first. This directly impacts your growth, market position, and ability to innovate, leaving you to play catch-up.
  • Eroding Morale: Nothing burns out a team faster than seeing their hard work and long hours shelved because the initial hypothesis was wrong. It breeds cynicism and resistance to the next big idea, impacting future productivity and retention.

From Gambling to Learning: A Glimpse of the Solution

The antidote to this high-stakes gambling is to treat big ideas not as directives, but as hypotheses. In SAFe®, this is the core of the Validating Investment Opportunities competency.

Instead of funding a massive, multi-year project, you fund the smallest possible experiment—a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—designed to test a critical hypothesis with real customers. By applying a rapid Build-Measure-Learn cycle, you use real data—not opinions—to decide whether to pivot, persevere, or stop the initiative before you’ve wasted millions. This shifts the conversation from “Are we finished?” to “Did we learn?” It’s about reducing waste, de-risking innovation, and accelerating value delivery by ensuring your investments align with real customer needs.

Your First Step

You can start de-risking your investments this week. Look at the biggest, most expensive initiative (Epic) currently funded or being considered in your portfolio. Write down in the lean business case, what business outcome do we hypothesize will occur because this is delivered to our customers? Ask product leadership and architects, what’s the smallest thing we can build in under 3 months to see if that hypothesis might be true?

Then, gather the Epic Owner and relevant Business Owners and ask this one crucial question:

“What is the single, riskiest assumption this entire investment rests upon, and what is the cheapest, fastest experiment we could run next week to prove or disprove that assumption with real customer feedback?”

If the answer involves building a large part of the final product, you’re still planning a bet, not a validated investment. Your goal is to find the smallest actionable learning, not the first deliverable.

Unlock the Full Blueprint

Knowing you should test assumptions is easy. Building an organizational system that does it repeatedly, at scale, is hard. The Validating Investment Opportunities competency provides a complete blueprint for defining Epics, crafting compelling MVPs, and establishing the processes to make data-driven portfolio decisions that accelerate learning and value.

Stop betting the business on a guess.

Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build an organization that out-learns the competition. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.

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1 Stanford University, “Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail,” VCS 2019 Conference Report, 2018, accessed October 28, 2025, https://conferences.law.stanford.edu/vcs2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/63/2018/09/001-top-10.pdf