The risks of playing it safe

“Never was anything great achieved without danger.” - Machiavelli

Don’t let your big ideas go to a farm upstate

Fortune favors the bold. Corporate comms, traditionally, does not. As an industry, we communicators are very skilled at being careful, measured, safe. These can be good things, but they stand in the way of great things.

There’s a common belief that less risk equals less error. That’s wrong. When you avoid risks, you don’t make fewer mistakes — you make different mistakes. You make mistakes of omission. And for startups in particular, those are the worst kind of mistakes because your enemy is the status quo. When you only play it safe, you forfeit opportunities to define a new category, change people's minds, stoke an important debate, and maybe even change the whole trajectory of your company. 

Won’t taking risks also lead to mistakes? Yes, inevitably. But here’s the key: don’t do anything obviously dumb.

Don’t do it, man

Or, more straightforward, don’t do anything illegal or unethical. Don’t let your instincts be overridden by fear or emotion.

Then take educated bets on your judgment and abilities, and even when you make mistakes they’ll be mistakes of commission — data-rich mistakes, the kind that help you hone your craft. Over the long term, you’ll win more than you lose, and your Ls will be productive and respectable, even if they feel crummy as all failures do.

In any case, you don’t have a choice. When you’re building software, the quickest way to improve the product is to get what my old boss, Substack CEO Chris Best, calls “contact with reality,” so you can learn from real-world experience and calibrate accordingly. In comms, when the product you’re building is opinions (the softest ware of all), testing out ideas in the real world is even more important because the interaction between your comms strategy and the collective human psychology of your audience is simply too complex to predict in the abstract. You have to put things into the wild and see how they do. Cross the river by feeling the stones.

It’s easy to find an excuse to avoid risk. The compliance officer in your head will tell you that you don’t have enough resources to take big swims and should just focus on the basics, or it won’t work anyway so you should just let your CEO interview with a bunch of low-quality media outlets that you secretly know are a waste of time. 

That kind of FUD creeps in easily; even as I’m typing this post, I know I’ll have to fight it later today. But sheltering in the safety of “tried and true” tactics is like keeping your assets in cash. You should definitely do it some of the time, but if that’s all you ever do in the long term, you’ll never build your portfolio. In fact, as the rest of the economy grows, your purchasing power will fall further and further behind. 

When you’re creating something original, you don’t have the luxury of following someone else’s dog-eared playbook. Great companies don’t get built on minimizing downside, but on maximizing upside. The same goes for the comms strategies that define their brands over time.

So if there’s an idea that’s been tugging at you, try it. If it doesn’t work, try something else. And never stop. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious brand?