Run it Up the Flagpole and See if Anyone Salutes Day

What the day is

Run it Up the Flagpole and See if Anyone Salutes Day is observed on January 2. The instruction is to float an idea and watch what happens, rather than deliberating about it privately.

Origin and background

The phrase is mid-century American advertising slang, from the era when Madison Avenue was generating a great deal of memorable language about pitching ideas. It appeared in print and on screen in the 1950s and was already being used self-mockingly by then, as shorthand for a business culture that preferred testing a notion on an audience to thinking it through.

The mockery has aged badly, because running things up flagpoles turned out to be right. Most organizations are poor at predicting which ideas will work, and expertise helps less than people expect: the failure rate for new products is high, and it is high among experienced companies with research departments. If judgment is unreliable, cheap tests beat confident opinions.

That logic underpins most modern product practice. Split testing shows two versions to real audiences and keeps whichever performs. Smoke testing advertises something that does not exist yet and measures how many people try to buy it. Building the smallest version that can be released at all, rather than the complete version, is the same instinct formalized.

One caution belongs with it. Advertising a product that does not exist wastes the time of people who wanted it, and testing on people who did not agree to be tested has real costs. The technique is sound; using it without regard for whoever is on the other end is not.

How to take part

• Describe an idea you have been sitting on to three people today and watch the reaction rather than arguing for it.
• Ask what would have to be true for it to fail, before asking whether people like it.
• Test the cheapest possible version, not the finished one.
• Take silence seriously. Nobody saluting is the result, not the absence of one.
• Try it on something personal, since the same approach works outside work.