Most businesses are fighting fires daily—dealing with supply chain disruptions, customer churn, or talent shortages. But reacting to today’s problems, no matter how agile you are, keeps you stuck in a loop of reactive thinking.
What if you could skip the risk entirely and innovate with greater certainty?
This is where the Skip It Principle comes into play—a concept I’ve taught for years, and one that’s now more vital than ever.
What Is the Skip It Principle—and Why Does It Matter Now?
The Skip It Principle is simple but powerful: Don’t waste time solving the wrong problem. Instead, identify what can be skipped because it doesn’t add value or leads you down a path that won’t future-proof your business.
Too often, leaders focus on solving the problem in front of them, instead of stepping back and asking:
- Is this the real issue?
- What if we just skipped this step entirely and went around it?
Anticipatory Leaders know that the best way to reduce risk is not to manage it after the fact, but to bypass it entirely.
How Anticipatory Leadership Changes the Innovation Game
Anticipatory Leadership is about using Hard Trends—those future certainties we can’t ignore—to pre-solve problems and capitalize on disruptions before they occur. It’s a shift from reacting to change to shaping it.
When you apply the Skip It Principle through the lens of anticipation, you begin to:
- Bypass legacy systems that no longer serve your future goals
- Skip bureaucratic processes that slow down transformation
- Avoid investing time and resources in temporary fixes
This leads to low-risk innovation—a type of innovation that’s not about gambling on “what ifs” but acting on “what will be.”
How Did Tesla Skip the Dealership Problem Entirely?
While traditional automakers focused on optimizing dealership networks, Tesla asked a different question: Do we even need them?
Rather than trying to solve dealer-related challenges—territorial rights, inconsistent experiences, added costs—Tesla skipped the model entirely. They built a direct-to-consumer ecosystem based on online ordering, service centers, and over-the-air software updates.
By eliminating the dealership model, Tesla:
- Avoided legacy conflicts
- Reduced operational risk
- Gained full control of the customer experience
This is the Skip It Principle in action—disregarding inherited constraints in favor of building something aligned with a future certainty: the digitization of buying behavior.
Skip It Thinking in the Healthcare Industry
Telemedicine is another great example. During the pandemic, instead of trying to fix overbooked waiting rooms and overcrowded hospitals, healthcare providers asked a more visionary question: Can we skip the office visit entirely?
The result was a massive expansion of telehealth, enabled by already existing technologies like video conferencing, AI-driven diagnostics, and digital health records. The Hard Trend? Increasing mobile connectivity and the digitization of health data.
By skipping the traditional visit model, they unlocked scalable, accessible care—again, without the risks of brick-and-mortar expansion.
Three Steps to Apply the Skip It Principle in Your Business
Here’s how you can start applying this principle right now:
- Identify Future Certainties (Hard Trends):
What are the guaranteed shifts happening in your industry—like AI integration, remote work, or digital customer behavior? - Challenge the Status Quo:
Ask, “Is this problem even worth solving?” If not, skip it. Don’t automate the past—create the future. - Pre-Solve Instead of React:
Use the certainty of trends to develop preemptive solutions that make old problems irrelevant.
This isn’t just risk management—it’s risk elimination.
Why ‘Skipping It’ is the Ultimate Form of Innovation
In today’s rapidly evolving marketplace, innovation is not about who can build the fastest—it’s about who can skip what slows everyone else down.
Anticipatory Leaders understand that the path to transformational innovation doesn’t begin with better solutions—it begins with better questions. The most powerful question of all?
“Do we even need to solve this?”
By eliminating outdated assumptions, you unlock opportunities no competitor is even looking at.
Ready to Lead by Skipping the Noise?
I challenge you to look at your current challenges with a new lens:
- What legacy problems are you spending time and money on?
- What systems or processes are outdated, yet clinging to relevance?
- What assumptions are you making that need to be unmade?
Start by identifying one problem you’re currently working on—and ask if you can Skip It.
That simple mindset shift could unlock an entirely new business model, product, or service.
Let’s stop reacting. Let’s start anticipating. Because the future isn’t something to fear—it’s something to shape.