Enterprises are focused on problem-solving and innovation. We want to invest in digital transformation projects that solve problems for our customers, streamline internal operations, and deliver cutting-edge solutions that deliver business results. While this is a winning mindset, shiny object syndrome can derail problem-solving and innovation efforts within any organization, leading to failed implementations, unfocused priorities, and sunken costs.
What Is Shiny Object Syndrome?
Shiny object syndrome is a disproportionate focus on new ideas or solutions. Often, people and teams get distracted by exciting new ideas, tools, or concepts and lose touch with their core needs, goals, and principles.
Examples of shiny object syndrome in the workplace include:
- Switching software providers or implementing a new tool without sufficient reasoning.
- Focusing on new projects that are not as high priority simply because they’re new or interesting.
- Jumping on the latest tech or hype simply because it’s buzzworthy.
In the age of Generative AI, many of us are experiencing shiny objective syndrome in real time, perhaps without realizing it. This rapid and far-reaching technological advancement has pressured executives to utilize GenAI. For some companies, this pressure to implement an AI transformation has led to rabbit holes, failed tech implementations, and wasted resources.
This is a common struggle when new technology trends emerge. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of the shiny objective syndrome, how leaders fall into the shiny object trap, and how to avoid falling into its grasp.
Business Consequences of Falling for Shiny Object Syndrome
The tendency toward shiny objective syndrome is understandable in a way—new technology, ideas, and tools often lead to innovative solutions for our team and our users, so it makes sense that we turn our heads when something new pops up.
However, too much emphasis on what’s new and exciting carries many risks. Here are the core problems that arise as a result of the shiny objective syndrome:
Distraction from core priorities and business needs
When teams are constantly busy with what’s new and interesting, the business’s core priorities often fall by the wayside.
An internal example of this is an HR department that implements new software to collect more people-oriented data but damages the employee experience with too much data entry and cumbersome process changes that come with tool implementation.
A customer-facing example of this would be investing a large amount of product and development resources in an AI assistant but not enough in the core functionality and feature set that your customers have valued for years, resulting in erosion of customer satisfaction.
Wasted time and diverting technical resources
When something new takes an industry by storm, companies often take an all-hands-on-deck approach, enlisting many resources to figure out how to apply these current trends internally or externally. A common result is that companies waste time and resources implementing something that isn’t needed or utilized.
An example is what happened at some companies with the rise of AI assistants. The technology is truly spellbinding, and many teams rushed to create digital assistants. Unfortunately, in some cases, the AI assistant functionality didn’t correspond to a real user need. In those cases, shiny objective syndrome led to wasted time and resources pursuing something that didn’t provide value to the customer.
Failed technology implementation
New tooling can be enticing because it causes shiny objective syndrome, particularly in data-driven companies. There are product analytics platforms, user research tools, and tools that help with internal processes like communication and HR-oriented needs. Often, these tools show some initial potential in solving issues for the team, and business leaders are drawn to them.
However, shiny objective syndrome can cause leadership to move quickly toward implementation based on the promise of new tooling, without thoroughly checking whether it meets an internal need. Even if a new platform does answer a pain point for the team, other issues can be missed such as whether it has crucial integrations with existing tools.
When leaders encounter shiny objective syndrome in the context of new tools, the overall risk is failed technology adoption: wasting time, resources, and energy on a tool never adopted internally.
Losing the trust of your team members and leadership
Perhaps one of the most profound consequences of the shiny objective syndrome is the loss of trust across your organization or team and the resulting decrease in morale. Ultimately, everyone on your team wants to work hard on initiatives that make a positive impact. When teams put a lot of effort into projects that get thrown away or downsized because they weren’t a good fit in the first place, employees are understandably frustrated.
That frustration leads to less trust in leadership and the organization, and winning it back can be a lengthy process.
Who Is Most Susceptible to Shiny Object Syndrome?
Senior management and executive leadership are the most susceptible to shiny objective syndrome, as they generally have the agency to drive company strategy. This can lead to disastrous consequences.
For many reasons, even well-meaning and talented business leaders can fall prey to the shiny objective syndrome. Here are a few of the primary causes:
- Technology hype and pressure to innovate: When you combine big technological advancements with crowded markets with many competitors, leadership tends to get pressure from all directions to use new tech for digital innovation. This pressure to adopt emerging disruptive technologies can come from within, and it can also come from a board of directors or investors. In the current GenAI boom, many leaders have faced the pressure to utilize AI to get ahead in their respective markets – and for some, this amounted to shiny object syndrome – with product teams focused on embedding GenAI capabilities in a product while ignoring more pressing priorities and customer feature requests.
- The desire to cut corners: When new technology promises to create more streamlined business processes, leaders are often drawn to it because they hope it’ll increase the company’s bottom line by cutting corners and decreasing resource use. This presents a huge risk factor for the shiny objective syndrome, particularly when the current trend doesn’t have the desired outcome.
- Dissatisfaction with current progress or projects: Leaders are particularly susceptible to shiny objective syndrome when times are tough. If management is dissatisfied with the company’s current standing, they’ll often look for new solutions that may not be the best fit.
- Unrealistic expectations: New and current trends are hyped, and this can cause business leaders to develop unrealistic expectations about what new tech and innovative platforms can do for the business. As these expectations grow, leadership risks suffering from shiny objective syndrome and the increased likelihood of pushing initiatives that don’t end up bringing the desired results.
- Misalignment of company challenges and needs: Within any organization, there are bound to be different interpretations of what’s driving the company’s current challenges and how to define the most important organizational needs. Sometimes, leadership succumbs to shiny objective syndrome when there is misalignment and is looking for a quick fix to a challenge or issue for which there is no obvious solution.
While the risks are plentiful, the good news is that business leaders can often prevent Shiny Object Syndrome. In the next section, we’ll discuss how to safeguard your organization.
How Leaders Can Prevent Shiny Object Syndrome
As a business leader, you can create an organizational culture and cultivate a mindset that helps your executive team avoid shiny objective syndrome. Here are four best practices for protecting your organization and ensuring that new initiatives meet your team’s and your customers’ real needs.
1. Set north-star goals that align with business outcomes and customer needs
One of the primary risks associated with the shiny objective syndrome is that your team will waste time implementing internal or user-facing solutions that don’t meet real needs or bring you closer to your business goals. One way to avoid this is to foster clear goal alignment with measurable north-star metrics.
North-star goals help keep everyone on the team, regardless of role or department, aligned on what matters most. For example, let’s say that one of your north-star metrics is the lifetime value of a customer (LTV). When the team is working on new initiatives, they’ll know to think about whether or not a product iteration could potentially help raise the LTV. Upon release, they’ll also know to carefully measure this metric’s effect before investing more resources to continue developing the initiative.
North-star metrics help keep your team aligned on what truly matters, reducing the likelihood of susceptibility to the shiny objective syndrome.
2. Govern the new technology evaluation process
IT governance is a set of formal organizational standards and processes that help ensure that all new tool investments are feasible, necessary, and likely to deliver bottom-line results. When a company implements technology governance, it reaps the benefits by closely examining the relevance of new tools.
Since new tooling is a common catalyst for the shiny objective syndrome, working with your team to create or further develop your IT governance will help you avoid the syndrome altogether by ensuring that new tools are worthwhile.
3. Prioritize your focus on the most impactful projects
When you’re the leader of an ambitious organization, it’s difficult to prioritize because, by definition, prioritization means delaying or scrapping ideas. Overall, prioritization defines what’s most important and impactful, and frees your team up to work exclusively on those tasks.
Though difficult, focusing only on high-impact projects is a proven strategy for avoiding shiny objective syndrome. This mindset reduces the risk of being distracted by new technology or ideas that don’t meet customer or internal needs since the likelihood of impact is either low or hard to measure.
4. Reinforce the “why” over the “what”
A digital roadmap lists what features and iterations to implement and what projects to tackle. However, when you decide to utilize organizational resources for an initiative, you should hold yourself accountable for understanding and articulating why each project is important.
Taking the list of what your team would like to do and working out why it matters will help you avoid shiny objective syndrome because it’s a process by which you can understand whether or not an initiative meets internal or customer needs. Over time, as you prioritize why over what, you’ll avoid projects that distract your team from the things that truly bring you closer to reaching your goals.
Tips for Undoing the Damage Done By Shiny Object Syndrome
Despite our best efforts, the shiny objective syndrome will eventually plague your organization. In this section, we’ll review some strategies for handling it when you realize you’ve been chasing the wrong initiative.
- Spotlight the problem(s): Rather than avoiding new tools or technology altogether, highlight their inherent issues. Even if you’ve already evangelized an initiative and you’re walking back, you’ll regain the trust of your team if you acknowledge the mistake and harness it as a learning opportunity moving forward.
- Pause projects that don’t align with business outcomes and goals: One of the primary reasons shiny objective syndrome can wreak so much havoc is that leadership often gets stuck on the fallacy that since so many resources have already been invested, it’s too late to pause a project. The reality is that it’s never too late to slam on the brakes. As soon as you realize that a project isn’t aligned with your needs or goals and put an end to the investment, you begin saving and conserving resources for more impactful initiatives.
- Highlight the cost of projects that don’t align with north-star goals: An unfortunate truth is that every single second your team spends on a project that won’t propel you forward is a moment not spent working toward your organization’s goals. When you stop an initiative that isn’t serving the company or your users, communicate to your team the importance of working on projects that align with your north-star goals. This saves resources and keeps everyone on the lookout for time-wasting distractions in the future.
- Stay on top of new tech trends: While shiny objective syndrome is a real risk, the answer isn’t avoiding technology trends, but rather the opposite. New tools and tech can sometimes be a great opportunity for your team to reach its goals and the trick is to stay on top of trends and evaluate accordingly. Ask yourself: does this new technology help us meet the needs of our customers or our organization? How? Why is it important? How would we measure success?
Overall, you’ll want to avoid shiny objective syndrome – but when it inevitably surfaces, there are tools for mitigating its impact and moving forward.
New Technology Clicks Better With Whatfix
When choosing the right product initiatives and internal tooling that align with real needs, a goal and metric-based approach can help guide your organization toward the right decisions. Whatfix has three core products that enable your team to make the right technological investments. In this section, we’ll go through each and how it can benefit your organization.
Use Whatfix Product Analytics to monitor and analyze adoption
Whatfix Product Analytics is a no-code solution for monitoring and analyzing user behavior. Since it doesn’t require a developer or a data analyst, anyone on your team who makes application-related decisions can quickly and easily check their assumptions against the data.
With Whatfix Product Analytics, you can:
- Use Cohorts to monitor the user behavior of different user segments, like different teams or roles within your organization.
- Use Flows to understand where users experience friction in key flows within your mission-critical enterprise software application workflows or in your customer-facing apps.
- Measure user adoption to understand the extent to which your technology investments are realizing value and driving business outcomes.
With detailed and practical product analytics on Whatfix, you can ensure that your IT roadmap prioritizes the initiatives that will improve the user experience and help your team meet its business goals.
Support users in the flow of work with Whatfix DAP’s in-app guidance
The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) helps your team ensure you give your users the best chance at getting value from your technological investments. Sometimes, as with shiny object syndrome, you’ve simply made the wrong choice. However, even when your team has prioritized an initiative that answers a user need, users sometimes need guidance to reap the benefits.
With the Whatfix DAP, you can:
- Use In-App Pop-Ups to make users aware of new features
- Offer Product Walkthroughs to guide users in terms of how to use and get value from key features and flows on your platform
- Maintain and update Self Help, a self-serve knowledge base that helps users answer questions and get help exactly when they need it
- Use Surveys to collect user feedback at the right moment, helping your team understand how the customer experience can continue to improve
With the right tools, you can ensure that your quality technological investments don’t fail due to user confusion or a lack of awareness.
Use Mirror to provide hands-on application training in a sandbox environment
Practically speaking, with Whatfix Mirror, organizations can create sandbox replicas of their platforms so that new technology can be learned, tried, and tested in a true-to-life environment that doesn’t interfere with the customer experience.
This enables teams to:
- Train team members in a risk-free, hands-on environment
- Create a sandbox specifically for use acceptance testing, so that a beta launch of new technology can be tested for bugs and user satisfaction without disrupting the experience of the core product
With Mirror, your team can work better internally and optimize the user experience without the risks associated with changes to the core platform.
Overall, Whatfix allows your team to train end-users, support employees in the flow of work, and maximize the ROI of technology implementation and digital transformation.
Ready to empower your team to make the right tech investments? Book a demo today!
