I’ve been doing some advisory work with a group of social entrepreneurs who are passionate and enthusiastic business founders, and what strikes me about them is that sometimes it seems their opinionhas overwhelmed their ability to understand the facts of their situation. In one circumstance, an entrepreneur was struggling to convert a horrible personal experience into the foundation for a whole enterprise—when all evidence suggested that his experience could not be resolved in the manner being designed. The team was being driven by what I call a “minimum viable opinion.”

The minimum viable opinion is the antithesis of what Eric Reis REIS -0.76%termed the “minimal viable product” in his book The Lean Start-up. Reis’s premise is that if you want to understand whether or not you have a product that a customer will derive value from and that will grow a customer base, you have to test your understanding. The minimum viable product, is a test bed for experimenting to learn what is and is not acceptable and viable to a customer or user group. A minimum viable opinion is based not on user or customer experience but on the experience of one person: the entrepreneur. The minimally viable opinion must be tackled head-on before too many resources, time, and energy are wasted.

There are three ways in which entrepreneurs get themselves caught when creating solutions in search of a customer (let alone a market). The patterns to avoid are:

1. Passion trumps practicality
   1. Personal experience tops user experience
   2. Assumptions surpass actual data

   Passion trumps practicality

   Too often the experience of a single moment can drive the behavior of an entrepreneur. The power of that experience creates conditions that produce familiarity bias. We see an opportunity to address a problem that we have had and we think that others would want our solution—why wouldn’t they? Our passionate belief in the criticality of an issue—combined with our faith in ourselves to deliver a meaningful solution—begins to override practical issues, such as whether or not the problem is universal enough to build a business around, or if our solution’s better than the status quo (or other alternatives or work-arounds).

   I was working with a client who recognized the power of design thinking. She saw the potential to create breakthrough innovations in her company and was in a position to invest her own time and the budget of her team to spread the message. That passion was not enough to change the fundamental behaviors in the business, because people were not being given the time to learn the new 

   nd the budget of her team to spread the message. That passion was not enough to change the fundamental behaviors in the business, because people were not being given the time to learn the new skills, nor were they being compensated for creating new solutions. The business had other priorities and no amount of passionate advocacy was going to make design thinking a successful practice in that context.

   Personal experience tops user experience

   Our willingness to be driven by our personal experience can also help us ignore the evidence presented by others’ experiences. All our decisions are filtered through a story that we have created—based on our beliefs, knowledge, and real or imagined experiences—and that we believe. Those stories can prevent us from recognizing the deficiencies in our plans as entrepreneurs.