247: Are You Building the Future, Or Just Getting Better at Running the Present? (Reflections on Shawn Busse)
Erik walked away from his conversation with Shawn Busse thinking less about technology itself and more about what it actually takes to create something new inside a business.
Shawn described business as “the hardest art project ever,” and the idea stuck. Artists create through experimentation: they make something, react to it, change it, throw pieces away, and keep going. Businesses call those same behaviors prototyping, testing, iteration, and product-market fit.
The tension is that businesses eventually become very good at doing something else: execution. They optimize processes, improve margins, create predictability, and protect what already works.
Erik’s question coming out of the conversation is a provocative one: Have companies gotten so good at operating businesses that they’ve gotten worse at creating them?
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
- Creation and execution require different muscles. Optimization rewards consistency and predictability. Creation requires curiosity, taste, experimentation, and making decisions without complete information.
- Your org chart is a statement about power. Training, quality, R&D, innovation, brand, and other long-term capabilities can be called “strategic,” but their position in the organization reveals how much influence they actually have.
- Technological disruption isn't necessarily something you can wait out. Shawn contrasted recessions, where disciplined businesses may be able to preserve cash and ride out the cycle, with disruption like AI, where companies may have to innovate their way through it.
- Innovation needs multiple survivable bets. Don’t make a bet that kills the company if it fails. Make more than one bet. Learn what’s true before becoming overly committed.
- Outside perspective matters. Shawn’s memorable version: “Your mom might not be right.” Innovation needs people willing to tell you which ideas have legs—and which ones need to die.
🧩 The Personal Layer
What Erik keeps returning to is the emotional difficulty of being wrong once you’re invested.
It’s easy to say companies should test ideas and kill the ones that don’t work. It gets much harder after someone has spent money on the idea, attached their reputation to it, or publicly announced that it represents the future.
At that point, learning has a social cost.
That makes genuine experimentation as much a leadership challenge as an innovation challenge. Leaders need to create enough separation between “this idea failed” and “I failed” that people can respond to evidence instead of defending their identity.
And there’s another tension: the people optimizing today’s machine and the people imagining tomorrow’s machine are doing fundamentally different work. As Erik puts it, the R&D lab can’t really live on the factory floor. Both functions matter—but forcing creation to follow the rules of optimization too early can kill promising ideas before the organization discovers what they could become.
🧰 From Insight to Action
- Look at your org chart as a map of power. Which capabilities actually influence strategy—not just appear in company messaging?
- Separate creation from optimization. Give experimentation enough room to operate before demanding the efficiency and predictability expected from mature operations.
- Build a portfolio of survivable bets. Instead of staking everything on one “big idea,” run smaller experiments that generate useful information without creating existential risk.
- Get comfortable killing ideas. Decide what evidence would cause you to stop an experiment before ego, money, and reputation become attached to it.
- Find someone who isn’t your mom. Build relationships with people who can challenge your assumptions without needing to protect your feelings or validate your ideas.
🗣️ Notable Quotes
- “Business is the hardest art project ever.”
- “An org chart isn’t just a reporting structure. It’s a statement about what has power.”
- “If the people with the most power are primarily responsible for protecting revenue, controlling cost, and keeping the existing machine running, it shouldn’t surprise us when the business gets very good at operating the present, but has trouble inventing the future.”
- “Agility isn’t just speed. It’s the ability to learn without putting the company at existential risk.”
🔗 Links & Resources
