The Wrong Question

On June 14, 2022, a few days after LIV Golf played its first event, I opened a Google Doc and started writing down questions.

I wasn’t primarily interested in whether LIV could recruit more stars or put pressure on the PGA Tour. I was interested in whether there was a path to sustainable success for them.

One of the questions I wrote was: Can LIV continue on this path? How long does it desire to lose money?

Another was: What is their long-term play?

LIV had something most organizations trying to disrupt an established industry can only dream about: extraordinary resources. It could recruit some of the best golfers in the world. It could guarantee enormous purses. It could build events globally. It could create teams, use shotgun starts, shorten the viewing window, add music and concerts, and experiment with a different kind of professional golf experience.

And some of those ideas clearly found an audience. That matters. LIV demonstrated that there was interest in a different professional golf product. It showed that parts of the traditional model could be challenged, and that some fans and players were willing to engage with something different.

But four years later, the question I find more interesting is the same one I was asking at the beginning: was the value LIV created for that audience sufficient to support the extraordinary cost of creating it?

That’s a different measure than whether they built something new. Having resources gives an organization the ability to execute ideas. It does not tell the organization which ideas matter. And executing something new does not automatically make it innovation.

The sequence most organizations get backwards

I’ve come to think organizations with resources tend to run this in the wrong order. They have the money, the talent, or the platform, so they ask: what could we do?

That question generates ideas. The ideas get funded. They get launched. And because they’re new, different, or well executed, we call the result innovation.

But meaningful innovation is more than producing something new. It has to create a better, sustainable solution to a problem that actually matters to the people you need to serve well.

This means that valuable work must happen before you start asking what to build.

Who must we serve well?

What do they need or value enough for us to matter to them?

What has changed about that need since we last got this right, or since we started?

Can we create and deliver that value in a way that’s sustainable for both of us?

Only once those are answered honestly should we ask how might we do it?

The same missteps can happen from different starting points

That distinction became clear to me from the opposite side while helping lead the restructuring of a national sports organization, after an offering that had worked extraordinarily well for years began losing traction with the partners and communities we served.

LIV raises the question of whether abundant resources can make it easier to move from possibility to execution before the diagnosis is complete. We faced a different version of the same temptation. Because the old model wasn’t working as well anymore, our instinct was to reach for new ideas, new programs, and new platforms before we fully understood what had changed.

We had to resist the natural desire to immediately swing for a big new home run. Innovation required the discipline to take smaller swings: first learning who we were best positioned to serve, what would create meaningful value for them, and whether we could deliver that value sustainably for both them and us.

We didn’t need more ideas. We needed to understand what had changed.

Where this leaves you

LIV had resources few organizations will ever possess. The organization I was helping lead had something different: a model that had worked for years and earned significant trust.

In neither case was generating another idea the difficult part.

The harder work was diagnosing what had changed, who needed to be served, what they actually valued, and whether the next solution could create enough value to sustain itself.

That’s why I’ve become increasingly skeptical when the first question in a discussion on addressing a strategic challenge is:

What could we do?

It’s an exciting question. It’s just usually too early.

Diagnosis before ideation. Clarity before prescription. Innovation isn’t invention, it’s knowing exactly what’s true before you decide what’s next.

Questions for Leaders

• Who do we serve, and what do they value right now?

• What has shifted in their needs that we are ignoring?

• Are we brainstorming because we completed the diagnosis, or because ideation is easier?

• Without our current programs, would we build them from scratch today?