Delivering the Unexpected, Part III

Over the last couple of days, I’ve talked a lot about giving customers not what they think they need, but what you KNOW they need.

Popular mass expectations are the easy route.

But the path with the greatest reward is the one not traveled by the popular conceptions of the day.

Consider this: Through the centuries many thought a 4-minute mile was not humanly possible. The story goes that the ancient Greeks went so far as to have wild animals pursue their top runners in an effort to break the barrier. It didn’t work. I don’t know if that’s because the wild animals weren’t fast enough or the stunt ended badly for the pursued runners.

It wasn’t until 1954 that Sir Roger Bannister, pursued not by wild animals but fierce human competitors, proved the 4-minute mile was not a physical barrier.

It was a mental obstacle.

He shattered the common belief that humans were incapable of racing that fast by sprinting the distance in 3:59.4 – or roughly 15 miles per hour. Bannister effectively opened the floodgates for other runners to accomplish the feat, as in the coming years several harriers would go sub-4, including the famed Jim Ryun who was the first high school student to break the “barrier.”

Thanks to Bannister knowing it could be done, and executing on a belief that perhaps only he held, sub-4 is no longer a “barrier” but a standard for all male professional middle-distance runners.

We see other examples of this notion of innovators and risk-takers bringing down the barriers of what is commonly thought as possible. Look at the iPad, iPod, iAnything. These devices were a novelty at first and now there is a flurry of other incarnations of tablet and mobile devices marketed by innumerable organizations.

Popular sentiment can hold us back.

We can begin to believe that people are only capable of certain things.

We can box ourselves in, and refrain of charting territory outside of that limiting “box.”

But just as Bannister and Jobs and Cuban have shown us this week, all it takes is one visionary to break down the walls that we believe to be real, but are only really imagined.

When we shatter those conceptions, we open up a new world not only to our customers and stakeholders, but to future innovators who may otherwise have not thought it – whatever “it” is – possible.

What notion are you going to crush?