Prepare yourself for a voyage into the impossible. We assure you, we will arrive at specific strategies for business growth and profitability, but the road to our destination leads us through the darkest forests of theoretical physics. Don’t be afraid. There are no equations to memorize and no test at the end, but you must understand the logic behind hypothesis-based innovation to guide you in designing your own.

Otherwise, you might end up taking advice from experts, without testing whether their reasoning is sound. Bad advice from people who call themselves experts is really the worst thing in the world for your business.

In the quest to test if your reasoning is sound and your results are valid, the Universal Undo Button will be your greatest ally. This series of seven parts shows you how to create one.

Is it Groundhog Day Again Already?
Sometimes an idea is so clever that it transforms itself into a genre. Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery set off a stampede of Western Movies after 1903. F. W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Nosferatu give birth to the genre known as Monster Movies in 1922. And Harold Ramis’ time-twisting Groundhog Day created the Infinite Loop genre. The rule in this genre is that the main character must get stuck in a seemingly endless repeat, reliving a single day or single situation forever until they are able to figure out what they did wrong.

Films in the genre include: Run Lola Run, Naken, Primer, Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow, and the Last Day of Summer.

In all these films, the protagonist is granted (or cursed with) the Universal Undo Button. They involuntarily keep hitting Undo and trying variations of their own behaviour until they achieve success, whatever that means in the story.

We have all wished for something like that, but just not stuck in the always on position. We wished that we had a do-over, that we hadn’t sent a sensitive email, that we paused before handing over our credit cards, that we took a different route to work, or that we hadn’t said what we said.

Just a few seconds of Undo would make a lifetime of difference. That’s what we want to create for your company.

The Universal Undo Button is more than a psychological learning mechanism in fantasy films. There is a form of the Undo Button that actually exists in our world. It is, in fact, the most powerful tool there is for the successful innovator.

It is not a physical mechanism like a remote control. The Universal Undo Button is the process of structured experiments based on hypotheses. It lets you try out many possible realities. What would you attempt if you knew you could hit reset if it didn’t work? What kinds of innovation have you not attempted due to the fear of failure?

When you use it to mitigate fear, the Universal Undo Button can unleash powerful waves of creativity for your business processes. You can work through alternate futures on your own, in a group, or even at the level of the entire organization. This teaches you how to embrace experimentation and to fail fast without fear.