The demo landed. A handful of real users tried the offer and asked for it again. Months later the slide still says pilot, the budget still says temporary, and the people who built it are back on their old jobs.
A trial with no end date is a place to park a decision. The idea can be good. The holding pattern is what finishes it off. Nobody has to scale it, and nobody has to stop it, so it consumes a little money and a lot of attention until the champion leaves.
The committee that approves nothing
Steve Blank, writing on how companies strangle innovation, describes a firm that built committees, forms and pitches so a flood of ideas would stop overwhelming the people who run the current business. In the nine months that process ran, the company approved no new initiatives. Funding followed the best demo, the best slides or the hardest lobby. The ideas that needed evidence never had to produce any.
He argues that innovation has to be a process from the first conversation through to deployment. Along the way he adds a Horizon 0, a place to defer or graveyard ideas that are not viable. Incubation, he notes, dies of malnutrition when a project cannot get resources, or becomes an orphan when nobody parents it. When that pipeline then meets an organisation built for execution, adoption stalls.
That is the hallway I mean by pilot purgatory. The small test worked well enough to be embarrassing to kill, and too unfinished to fund. The idea sits between those two doors. Corporate innovation training that ends on a showcase, with no date and no named owner for the next decision, builds another room in that hallway.
Write the decision before the test
Corporate innovation training should leave three lines on one page. The belief you are testing. The result that ends it. The result that earns a thicker build, and the person who can sign either line. Write them before anyone is proud of the prototype. A result chosen after the demo will be written to protect the demo.
The lean startup and product sprint is the room for that page. Innovation teams, product squads and the sponsor who can fund or stop the work stay until the decision. We use a live bet, the smallest test that could change your mind, and a line the sponsor can defend in the next budget meeting. What that day should put under test, once the bet is named, is in a lean startup workshop for corporate teams. The longer note on writing the line before you spend is in test the bet before you fund it.
A date, or the work is a hobby
Give the pilot a last day. On that day the work scales, changes or stops. Put the sponsor's name on the page, and keep them for the conversation. A champion who can only present the demo will protect the pilot, because stopping it looks like a failed project on their name. A sponsor who agreed the kill line in advance can stop a weak idea and keep the team's credibility.
Send me the bet in one sentence, the name of the person who can stop it, and the date you will decide. We will shape the sprint around that decision. An idea that cannot name its end is already in the hallway, spending attention it will not get back.
