If competitors are launching things you should have thought of first, that's usually a signal everyone at your table thinks the same way.
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
I've talked before about relying too heavily on internal promotion - long-standing teams tend to follow similar thinking patterns. It's not a people issue.
It's what happens when everyone has come through the same environment over time.
You can't force that to change overnight, and you can't just tell people to think differently and expect it to happen.
It requires certain working conditions:
- People need time to step away from the day-to-day.
- They need trust to try things without getting it right the first time.
- And they need space to work on new ideas - not squeeze them in around everything else.
Google formalised this with "20% time" - part of the week set aside to work on something outside your day job. It was agreed and backed by the business, which is where Gmail came from.
If you’re committed to innovation, it needs to be treated as real work. Building it into objectives or development plans will make it visible and agreed upon across the team.
The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.