Your Team Just Quoted 8 Weeks. What if They're Off by 99%?

I thought I was running a standard innovation workshop with one of my favorite clients. Instead, I accidentally broke an entire organization's understanding of what's possible.

Let me explain.

The Setup

Picture this: I'm in Mexico City, working with a large company that had just completed several successful weeks of basic AI training. We'd spent the morning ideating transformative AI possibilities for their business—the kind of blue-sky thinking that gets executives excited. By lunch, we had compiled about a thousand ideas and down-selected to ten promising concepts.

Ten teams. Ten big ideas. All championing something they genuinely believed could transform their business.

Before we broke for lunch, I asked a simple question: "Real quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation—if you were going to prototype this idea to test in the market, what's your request for leadership in terms of budget and time?"

The company leaders were all in the room, so I gave folks a moment to make their calculations.

The answers rolled in: "Eight weeks and $50,000." "Nine weeks and $80,000." "Seven weeks and $60,000."

Variations on a theme, but all in that same ballpark.

I thanked the group, and we went to lunch.

The Plot Twist

While everyone else was enjoying their 90-minute break, my partner and I built one of their ideas.

Not a mockup. Not a wireframe. A working prototype.

When the teams returned, I casually asked that specific team, "How long did you say that prototype was going to take?"

"About nine weeks."

"And how much would it cost?"

"Around $60,000."

"Wait," I said, pulling up the screen. "Is it something like this?"

We walked them through the live prototype. People could create accounts, generate purchase histories, see real-time recommendations. It was functional, testable, and ready for customer feedback.

You could watch everyone's minds being blown in real time.

The Moment Everything Changed

The workshop essentially derailed at that point—and I mean completely derailed. The entire afternoon agenda went out the window. Nobody cared about the remaining slides or structured discussions. The conversation shifted from "here are our cool ideas" to "if we can create an idea this quickly, what does that say about how we calculate ROI?"

This wasn't just about speed. This was about a fundamental miscalculation happening in boardrooms everywhere.

Think about it: ROI is return divided by investment. The return is the numerator, the investment is the denominator. In an AI-powered world, that denominator is changing rapidly—but most people have no idea.

If a manager asks a team "How long will this take?" and they say eight weeks, that manager has two choices. If they're not enlightened about what's possible, they'll accept the eight weeks. If they understand the new paradigm, they'll say, "Absolutely not. This has got to take eight hours."

The problem? Most managers don't even know a new paradigm is possible.

The Confession That Made Me Sick

Here's the thing that really gets me: Just two weeks before that experience in Mexico, I had led a financial services company in New Zealand through what I thought was a successful innovation session. We'd ideated, prioritized, and culminated in several beautifully written PRD documents for their CEO to review.

I was proud of the work. Clean process, good ideas, professional deliverables.

Then I'm sitting in Mexico City, watching minds blow over a 90-minute prototype, and I realized: I had just led an entire team to the exact paradigm that was completely broken. The innovation expert had guided them to create documents instead of demonstrations, descriptions instead of working prototypes.

I felt sick about it. Literally sick.

I sat there replaying the New Zealand session in my head. All those smart people, all that energy, all that potential—and I had channeled it into the old way of working. I had given them the satisfaction of "innovation theater" while completely missing the actual innovation opportunity.

It became a moral obligation to reach back out to that CEO. How could I let them sit there thinking they had experienced the future of AI-powered innovation when I now knew they had barely scratched the surface?

Why This Matters More Than You Think

This isn't just about moving faster—it's about expanding what I call "experimental capacity," the real bottleneck to innovation.

In our book Ideaflow, we defined innovation as "ideas over time." But I've never been fully satisfied with that definition. As Marc Randolph put it in his fantastic memoir about Netflix: "This insight informed everything: it was not about having good ideas. It was about building this system and this process and this culture for testing lots of bad ideas."

The real, practical bottleneck to innovation isn't ideas—it's the capacity to run experiments. You can have a thousand brilliant ideas, but if you can only test five of them, your innovation potential is capped.

This constraint forces organizations to be unnecessarily selective. We only test ideas that seem "plausible" or "promising." We ignore the weird, the counterintuitive, the seemingly absurd—even though innovation history is filled with breakthroughs that initially seemed ridiculous.

AI is quickly removing that constraint.

The Pattern Is Everywhere

This isn't an isolated phenomenon. I'm seeing it across continents and industries.

John Waldmann, CEO of Homebase, captured this perfectly on Beyond the Prompt: "Nobody sat here and was like, ‘A 20 page PRD doc is the best way to talk about product.’ We kinda like ended up there accidentally and probably to the detriment of everybody involved."

At Homebase, they've transformed from 20-page requirement documents to 2-minute functional prototypes. Instead of John spending his time reading documents to stay current on what they might build, his teams can show him clickable prototypes that communicate ideas instantly.

"It allowed us to kind of like pressure test our thinking," John explains. "Instead of very linear kind of product building, very stepwise product building... this has allowed us to just blow that up and allow anybody to go out and get feedback in a new way."

When I reached back out to that New Zealand CEO, we conducted a follow-up session where we demonstrated going from concept to working prototype using AI tools. After just three hours together, one experienced developer remarked: "What we just did in the last 30 minutes would have taken most of us weeks to accomplish without these tools."

The relief in that CEO's voice was palpable. We had given her what she actually needed: not more documents to read, but working prototypes to test in the field.

The Massive Blind Spot

Here's what's terrifying: organizations are making go/no-go decisions based on obsolete investment assumptions.

Teams are trapped in old paradigms while their actual capability has been transformed. Like the National Park Service facility manager who built an assistant that saves thousands of days annually in just 45 minutes, the potential is there—but only if people know it exists.

The competitive risk isn't just missing opportunities. It's accepting an entirely obsolete paradigm that will make your organization increasingly uncompetitive.

When I challenge teams to recalibrate their estimates, the resistance is real. "But we need to account for testing, integration, user experience..." Yes, absolutely. But are you accounting for eight weeks of testing, or eight hours?

The manager who accepts "eight weeks" when "eight hours" is possible isn't just inefficient—they're operating in a different reality than their AI-enabled competitors.

The Recalibration Challenge

So here's my question for you: When was the last time you actually tested your assumptions about what's possible?

If your team estimates eight weeks for something, your default response shouldn't be "great, let's plan for ten weeks with a mid-point check-in." It should be "show me why this can't be done in eight hours."

This requires a fundamental shift from "should we build this?" to "why haven't we built this yet?"

Try this experiment:

• Take your next project estimate and divide it by 100

• Challenge your team to prototype in that timeframe

• Build alongside them—don't just watch

• Measure your experimental capacity, not just your idea generation

The goal isn't to eliminate all planning or testing. It's to recalibrate your baseline understanding of what investment actually requires in an AI-powered world.

The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think

This moment won't wait for you to catch up. While you're accepting eight-week estimates, your competition is recalibrating their entire innovation engine.

The organizations that understand this shift aren't just moving faster—they're expanding their experimental capacity by orders of magnitude. They're testing hundreds of ideas where you're testing five. They're iterating in real-time while you're scheduling review meetings.

Your team just quoted eight weeks and $50,000. What if they're off by 99%?

Stop accepting outdated investment assumptions. Start building prototypes during lunch breaks.

The future belongs to those who know what's actually possible—not those who cling to what used to be necessary.

P.S. Speaking of recalibrating what's possible: My teaching partner from Mexico and I are hosting an AI Breakthrough Weekend this October for leaders who are tired of accepting eight-week estimates in an eight-hour world. If reading about that 90-minute prototype made you think "I need to see this for myself," this intensive is designed to give you the hands-on skills to build working prototypes, not just talk about them.

We'll take you from concept to clickable demonstration in real-time—no prior technical experience required. Because the biggest barrier to AI transformation isn't the technology; it's knowing what's actually possible when you sit down and build something yourself.

Details and registration here, limited to 30 leaders who are ready to stop theorizing and start prototyping.

Related: 45 Minutes That Saved 20 Years: The Story of An Unlikely AI Hero
Related: Exponential Ideaflow: Why AI Will Surpass Human Creativity (And Why That’s OK)
Related: Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters
Related: Beyond the Prompt: John Waldmann

Join over 24,147 creators & leaders who read Methods of the Masters each week