Do You Experiment at Work?
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One of the most tragic things I hear in management circles is this:
"I want to make a breakthrough happen. I really really do. But I don't want to take any risks. How do I do that?"
If I'm honest, and say "Well that's nice. It's just, you see, well, it's fundamentally impossible." They walk away in search of another author dude who's willing to pretend it isn't.
The principle at work here is knowledge capture: if an innovation is something new, or something you haven't done yet, you have to capture the knowledge and skills needed to do it. An experiment is one of the few ways to capture knowledge you don't have. If there are no experiments, you are repeating yourself, and can't possibly be putting new ideas into practice.
An easy test of the culture of an organization, or the potential for change in a manager, is to ask the following question:
What was the last experiment you did at work?
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
The problem is that most business managers hate experiments. They want guaranteed returns. Predictable profits. Introducing uncertainty works against what they're trying to do. The comedy is that whatever profits they're talking about protecting originated from the founders of the company doing a huge experiment: starting a new company.
Take any popular innovation success story and follow it backwards and you'll find a kind of experiment. Either a question or a hypothesis that someone committed time to trying to prove. Take Amazon.com - "Can we profitably sell books over the web?" or E-bay "Will people trade all of their stuff online?" In the mid 1990s when these companies started, most of the world looked at these experiments and thought they were a waste of time.
An easy measure of innovation at work is this: how common are experiments? How many people feel comfortable trying to do new things, and how easy is it to get support from managers to do them?
If experiments are rare, I doubt many new ideas make it off the drawing board. In fact there probably isn't even a drawing board for people to propose ideas on at all.
It's an easy test: what was the last experiment you did, or made it possible for someone on your team to do, at work? If you want more creativity, create safe places and resources for people to do experiments. Make it okay to fail. Because it's in those "failures" that new knowledge will be discovered.
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Scott Berkun is the best-selling author of 
Comments
The nice thing about experiments is that if it fails you actually succeeded as an experiment is precisely that, it does not guarantee neither good nor bad results. But it does provides results.
My current experiment consists of an internal forum or community that builds around failed projects. The purpose is to try to capture the lessons from a project that did not end well or did not end at all. Many of the lessons revolve around bad management decision making, that is unrealistic deadlines, objectives, priorities.
The experimental portion of it is the reaction of management on this as they are highly questioned on their decisions and the logic they follow to take those decisions.
So far I am still working here and the extent of the experiment is limited to a small area of the business, as progress is made in the form of projects avoiding such failure modes and being successful more areas might be interested or included in the experiment.
Lets see how it goes.
JP
regionativo.com
- Posted by Jose Paez
July 24, 2008 5:47 PM
Jose, that kind of experiment seems interesting... I currently work with software projects and it really got my attention, do you have more details about it in your webpage?
- Posted by Leo Palacios
July 24, 2008 8:51 PM
Hi Leo
I started a post in my site titled: Embracing Failure. I need to continue the series to that one precisely with more details of this experiment. If you want to discuss feel free to email me.
JP
regionativo.com
- Posted by Jose Paez
July 25, 2008 4:36 PM
I consider myself a luck man. I HAVE to experiment everyday.
I work in a place with little money and great expectations. I have to come up with ideas and solutions all the time. And nothing is more exciting when they let me build what I imagined :)
I think that people, after several years without experimenting, tend to loose their ability to do so. I think that when you do the same everyday and don't have space to innovate, you get used to it and it's very hard to catch up later.
Nice article. It reminds me of a phrase I read in a Frank Herbert's book, called Heretics of Dune:
"Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice."
- Posted by Fábio Mengue
July 25, 2008 6:55 PM
Experiments are discouraged mainly because:
1. Cost - Everyone can experiment for free. If every failure involves even a small amount of money, a series of failed experiments will bleed the budget.
2. Thiking is tiresome - It is so easy to be in the routine. Anything that disturbs it becomes a chore.
3. Failure is boring - A couple of failed experiments and those around you stop taking you seriously (especially if the experiment involves them as well). It becomes increasingly difficult to keep others interested in your experiments.
- Posted by Sharad Joshi
July 26, 2008 7:58 PM
I think it's a lot easier to try new things at a small company/organization. These places tend to be more flexible and have a bit higher tolerance for experiments and open communication of new ideas - it's a big part of why I've always enjoyed these kinds of work environments.
That being said, the status of the economy is making everyone very cost conscious. It's simply harder to justify spending more money and resources over something with a largely unexpected outcome.
- Posted by rodica
July 28, 2008 2:49 PM
I wholeheartedly agree. I think this is a concise way of expressing what I'd argue is the general problem: how to most effectively find new maxima ("global maxima") in a fitness landscape.
Familiarize yourself with this problem (dumb rules for climbing the hill in front of you, with the occasional "jumper" [i.e. experiment] to try and find new, interesting, "higher" peaks) and you'll have a great framing for how to balance risking experiments vs other uses of your time.
(Evolution by natural selection is a highly effective implementation of hill-climbing. Much of the research around fitness landscapes has been driven by evolutionary biology)
- Posted by Steve C
July 29, 2008 3:43 PM
It's the corporate results-this-quarter mentality, which discourages long-term thinking, which discourages experimentation. I'm tempted to say this trend has worsened over the years but it would make me sound like a curmudgeon.
Doesn't make it any less true, though.
Anyway, we should try to buck this trend and support experimentation, at work and in life, so that's why this is such a good article!
- Posted by Working Girl
July 31, 2008 11:14 PM