Saying yes to mean no

Recently, I had two similar conversations with two similar people that ended up with very different outcomes. Both conversations started the same way: I brought up an idea I had that I wanted feedback on. In both cases I was talking with people smarter then me who had experience I thought would shed light on the idea I was trying to refine. After I explained the basic idea, both people thought the same thing: "that is going to be really really really hard to make work". But the end result of the conversations were very different. In one case, the conversation lasted about 10 minutes and then the subject was courteously changed to something else. In the other case,  the conversation turned into an hour+ discussion about the idea full of new insights, new potential, and eventually a significant improvement on the original idea. 

Why were the outcomes so different if the initial response from folks I was talking to was so similar? Because the first person said no and the other person said yes but meant no and that approach made all the difference.

"but why hasn't it been done before"

In past posts I have talked about a few types of arguments we currently use when developing technologies that I like to call "biased 3rd party arguments". These arguments rely on a non-existant 3rd party to "help" us judge what technologies we should develop and what technologies we should put on the shelf. A perfect example is the devil's advocate. When someone invokes the devils advocate, they are not themselves making an argument against an idea, they are bringing in a 3rd party (the devil's advocate) in order to make an argument they may or may not believe in. Occam's razor is the same way, it invokes a 3rd party to come and make an argument. The problem with these arguments is that they are inherently biased toward the status quo by allowing people who dont have a valid argument to substantiate the claims they are making.

Adding to this list, lets talk about the question "why hasn't this been done before". If you have every worked on a project that is even a little bit different then the status quo, I guarantee someone (probably a manager or investor) has asked you this. Just like Occam's razor and the devil advocate, this argument invokes a 3rd party, All Of Time, to enter the room and pass judgement on your idea and, just like Occam and the devil's advocate, All Of Time is much more biased then we think.