If your living depends on the economy of ideas, chances are you’ve had a meeting like this. You know the one. Your client reviews your plans for the year. They like your ideas. They agree success will be achieved. Then, invariably, you get the question. “Can you come back with some really out of the box thinking? You know, something totally new. The next big thing.”

Normally, I love when clients do this. It means they are ready to move outside the comfort zone of stable but predictable results and really go for it. My team is usually chomping at the bit with a whole slew of innovative ideas that simply require a client with some cojones to pull them off. The table is set.

And so it begins. You conduct brainstorms. You pull the research and write the deck. The pitch is awesome. The concepts are killer and will launch a tidal wave of internet memes. That’s when this happens…

“I love it. Can you bring me some case studies that show how others do this?”

Oh noes.

For better or worse, the availability bias is stifling your innovations. At the risk of oversimplifying, the availability bias is how the prefrontal cortex evaluates risk based on the availability of similar situations it can readily recall when making decisions.

Case in point. You’re far more likely to die driving in a car within 25 miles of your home than in a fiery terrorist induced airline crash. But on a daily basis the media bombards us with images of crashed planes and terror scares while auto accidents, even fatal ones, barely make it out of the local papers. Thus, your prefrontal cortex will most likely associate flying with danger.

If someone you know is more afraid of flying than driving to Target, that’s the availability bias in action.

So what does this have to do with pharma? Well, everything. As most of you know pharma is, at its core, a risk averse culture. Everything is based on minimizing liability. The marketing and communications practice groups are oriented completely around legal and regulatory reviews, with every aspect of a program analyzed and inspected to insure nothing could be misconstrued or misrepresented.

When creating innovative programs, this can be a challenge. As the prefrontal cortex finds it harder and harder to associate innovation with success, new ideas become more difficult to sell in. As communicators see risk takers get punished and homogenous ideas get approved, a sort of mediocre groupthink sets in. At that point the lawyers don’t become the roadblock, the culture does, since things that are new begin to feel risky, regardless of whether they are or not.

This concept came to life for me recently as I was meeting with a client reviewing online media plans. 99% of the plan was a mix of sites that you’d normally expect to see, but we found an online gaming property that would perform far better than the rest. The site was respectable, had no sleazy ads, and over indexed in their target audience. We designated 2% of the budget for a 1-month test.

Client: “We can’t do this.”

Me: “Why? “

Client: “Because we’ve never bought media there before. No one will go for it“

As simple as it sounds, recognizing this little Jedi mind trick is the first step to making it work in your favor. The brain wants to draw on experience to feel more comfortable. As such, the more you can provide, the better off you will be, but how can you do this when an idea is totally new? Try these 3 things and you should have a better success rate getting to yes:

• Facilitate a culture of learning. The more new concepts and programs you can feed your clients, the less risky new ideas feel. You want to train them to look at new things and teach them that new, well, happens. Lunch and learns are great for this.
• Get the regulators to participate. By including legal in these sessions, they too begin to think in new ways. This will also provide you with invaluable insight as to how they think, what they look for, and what they need to feel comfortable saying yes.
• Show what got you there. It’s rare that an idea isn’t in some way built upon a previous one. Even Einstein admitted to standing on the shoulders of giants. Whenever possible, show the things that sparked the idea. It will help the clients get there too.