Coach K (Dave Kester) shares how leaning into his strength of ideation helped shape Coaching Actuaries—and what he’s learned about the importance of strategy, feedback, and focus along the way.
One key principle we have at Coaching Actuaries is that we are more effective if we focus on improving our strengths rather than our weaknesses. My son Josh is a certified StrengthsFinder coach and has helped our company’s staff understand their strengths and how they can use them well.
I resonated with this strategy because I knew my weaknesses were so deficient that I didn’t think there would be much benefit in trying to improve them. So, I figured I might as well focus on my strengths.
I also resonated with the belief that everyone has strengths—or at least talents—it’s just a matter of identifying and developing them. One of my talents/strengths is ideation. This basically means that I’m always thinking of ideas.
There are many advantages to ideation when starting a company because you need good ideas to build something different, yet useful.
But Ideation Has Downsides
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of ideas. I mean, a lot! In retrospect, many of them could be categorized as crazy, but they seemed good at the time. When our company was small (a staff of five), I was the decision maker, so I shared most of my ideas with the team. There were benefits from these ideas.
But as I’ve aged and other leaders have come alongside me, I’ve learned about the dark side of ideation. Here are a few examples where my ideas were more detrimental than helpful.
1. Ideas Without Strategy
My biggest problem was that I didn’t have a solid, focused strategy to start from. There was no compass guiding the company—just frequent ideas that seemed to change rapidly.
In formula: Ideas – Strategy = Disaster
2. Ideas Without Feedback
Early on, I acted on ideas without consulting mature people who could offer a different perspective. Just like one good idea can save a company, one bad idea can cause tremendous hardship.
I learned from the school of hard knocks. Once I faced the consequences of my bad decisions, I realized how much headache I could have avoided by thinking through possible negative scenarios first. I also tend to be an eternal optimist, which—paired with ideation—can be dangerous.
In formula: Ideas + Optimism – Strategy = Bigger Disaster
3. Ideas Without Prioritization
I underestimated the impact that new ideas had on my staff by pulling their focus away from what they were currently working on. Even though I may not have verbally stated it, my expectation was that they would maintain their current responsibilities and pick up my latest and greatest idea.
Clearly, that’s not sustainable—not in terms of time or productivity. Constant interruptions prevented the team from making meaningful progress.
In formula: Ideas + Optimism – Strategy – Discipline = Ruin (or at least many late nights)
A Costly Example: The Online Calculator
Years ago, when Adapt was really taking off, I had the idea to build an online calculator that could easily compute common functions students needed for exams. For example, it could solve for a fixed annuity: a student would enter the parameters, and the calculator would provide the answer along with dynamically generated steps.
It was pretty cool. But it took significant time to program and enter the formulas. At that time, we were still relatively young, and there were more important, core projects the programmer could have focused on. And our actuaries already had plenty of content to build.
The calculator got moderately good feedback—but how much did it really help students? What was the opportunity cost?
To make matters worse, the system would occasionally crash. It felt like the building was on fire when it did. Eventually, we discovered a bug in the calculator that caused the entire system to fail under certain conditions. Not only was the idea expensive in terms of lost opportunity, it nearly ruined the business.
Final Thoughts: Pair Ideas with Discipline
If you’re an idea person, my advice is to be careful. Even though your ideas have the potential to create wonderful things, they also have the potential to cause major problems—especially if you don’t pair them with strategy, discipline, and a healthy dose of skepticism.