Sarah Tucker: The Most Dangerous Words in Business

Sarah Tucker

The most expensive mistakes organisations make are rarely the result of stupidity.

If they were, they would be much easier to avoid.

The genuinely costly mistakes tend to begin life as perfectly sensible assumptions. They survive because they appear reasonable, they spread because they appear practical and eventually, they become so familiar that nobody remembers they were assumptions in the first place.

Over the past four years, while reviewing innovations for HundrED—the Finland-based organisation that annually identifies one hundred of the world’s most impactful and scalable education innovations—I repeatedly encountered organisations confronting an uncomfortable truth. Through its international Academy of reviewers, HundrED assesses hundreds of innovations worldwide each year before selecting its Global Collection.

What fascinated me was not how different these innovations were, but how similar they became once you looked beneath the surface.

Some operated in refugee settlements. Others worked in government schools. Some served a few hundred learners. Others reached hundreds of thousands. Some used sophisticated technology. Others relied on little more than ingenuity and determination.

Yet the strongest among them seemed to share a habit that felt remarkably relevant far beyond education: they questioned assumptions that everyone else had accepted without inspection.

This may not sound particularly revolutionary. Most organisations like to think of themselves as innovative. Annual reports are filled with references to innovation. Strategy documents are rarely shy about mentioning it. One occasionally suspects that if innovation were any more
enthusiastically discussed it might qualify for its own public relations team.

The difficulty is that much of what passes for innovation is optimisation.

Processes become faster. Systems become more efficient. Technology becomes more sophisticated. Costs fall. Productivity rises.

None of this is unimportant, but the problem is that optimisation assumes the destination is correct.

Reviewing these innovations repeatedly brought to mind Peter Drucker’s observation that there is nothing quite so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all, a deceptively simple idea.

After all, there is little value in becoming world class at solving the wrong problem.

One of the strongest examples came from Armenia through an organisation called TUMO. Today it operates internationally, helping young people develop skills in areas ranging from programming and artificial intelligence to design, animation and digital media.

Most educational systems confronting disengaged students ask a familiar question.

How do we motivate them?

The resulting answers usually involve incentives, assessments, interventions, accountability measures and various forms of encouragement designed to persuade students to engage more enthusiastically with a system they did not design.

TUMO approached the challenge differently.

Its founders considered the possibility that motivation might not be the central issue at all.

What if ownership mattered more?

What if students were disengaged not because they lacked motivation but because they lacked agency?

That shift in thinking produced an entirely different model. Learners exercise far greater control over what they study, how they learn and how they demonstrate progress. Whether one agrees with every aspect of the approach is almost beside the point.

The important thing is that TUMO did not emerge because somebody discovered a better answer; it emerged because somebody challenged a question.

Business history is full of similar moments, with the organisations we later describe as disruptive often beginning with what appears to be a relatively small act of intellectual disobedience. Somebody notices an assumption that everyone else has stopped seeing and asks whether it still deserves to survive.

A similarly elegant example emerged from India through an innovation called Skills on Wheels.

The challenge was straightforward. Many schools lacked access to vocational learning facilities.

Most organisations confronted with this problem would naturally focus on building more facilities. This would almost certainly involve strategic planning, feasibility studies, stakeholder consultations and several years of earnest discussion. Entire ecosystems have evolved around such activities and many perfectly decent people make their living from them.

Skills on Wheels asked a different question.

Why should the workshop remain in one place?

The answer became a fully equipped mobile vocational learning laboratory capable of travelling directly to schools and communities.

Once explained, the idea sounds so obvious that it creates a slightly uncomfortable feeling. The uncomfortable feeling generally comes from realising that a problem which generated years of discussion disappeared almost immediately when viewed from a different angle.

The founders did not solve the infrastructure challenge. Instead, they removed it, a pattern that appeared repeatedly throughout the review process.

The strongest innovations simplified where others complicated. They removed barriers where others added resources. They questioned assumptions where others refined systems.

Perhaps the most striking example came from the Social Innovation Academy, known as SINA, which operates across several African countries including Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

Most programmes designed for disadvantaged young people focus on employability, their objective being to help people acquire skills and find jobs.

SINA starts somewhere else entirely.

Instead of asking how young people can access opportunities, it asks how they can create them.

Participants establish enterprises designed to solve challenges within their communities. Success is measured through ventures launched, jobs created, and social impact generated.

The distinction sounds subtle when described in a paragraph, but in practice it changes everything.

One model assumes opportunity already exists and simply needs to be accessed.

The other assumes opportunity can be created.

That difference is not merely operational but conceptual, and conceptual shifts are often where genuine innovation begins.

The same instinct surfaced in Nepal through an initiative called the Financial Skills Marketplace. Most financial literacy programmes begin with information. They teach budgeting, saving and spending. The assumption is that poor financial decisions occur because people lack knowledge.

The founders suspected something else: most adults already know they should save more money.

The challenge generally begins at the precise moment that knowledge encounters reality.

Children therefore learn through participation in classroom economies where they earn, save, spend and invest. They experience trade offs directly rather than reading about them.

The lesson is learned through behaviour rather than instruction.

What fascinated me throughout the review process was that impact, scalability and sustainability frequently emerged from exactly the same source. The strongest innovations did not merely solve problems; they reframed them.

That observation feels increasingly relevant for business leaders.

Artificial intelligence is making information abundant. Expertise is becoming easier to access. Entire industries are discovering that activities once regarded as specialised can now be completed in seconds.

Under these conditions, the ability to generate answers is becoming less scarce. By contrast, the ability to define problems remains scarce and may ultimately prove to be the more valuable capability.

Reviewing innovations for HundrED has left me with an increasingly uncomfortable suspicion that many organisations have mistaken optimisation for innovation. They have become faster, smarter and more efficient, but occasionally in service of assumptions that nobody has examined for years.

The founders who impressed me most were not necessarily the most intelligent people in the room. They were not always the best funded, best connected or most technologically sophisticated.

What distinguished them was a willingness to pause long enough to inspect ideas that everyone else had quietly accepted as facts.

In Armenia, that produced a different way of thinking about engagement; in India, a vocational workshop on wheels; and in Uganda, entrepreneurs where others saw job seekers.

The solutions were different, but the intellectual move was remarkably similar.

At a time when answers are becoming cheaper, faster and more abundant than at any point in history, the organisations that thrive may not be those producing the best answers.

They may be the ones asking the questions everybody else has forgotten to challenge.

After all, there is very little point arriving at the wrong destination ahead of schedule.