We humans seem to strive to find patterns, even when there are none. That’s why stories in hindsight that paint a linear path are so soothing—no matter their seemingly magical changes of direction. Innovating, by contrast, is a highly nonlinear process.
What you do need to innovate, however, need not be complicated. That’s not what nonlinearity means. Nonlinearity simply requires you to accept that early on, your forecasted end-point is almost certainly wrong.
You need to expect to be wrong. When something doesn’t work, you know it. That knowledge is infallible. When innovating, you learn by being wrong.
From the book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong by Luis Perez-Breva