Creating Cultures of Experimentation

When’s the last time you tried something new in your organization? I don’t mean changing a supplier or buying a new copy machine. I’m talking about when you see an issue, need or gaping void in your organization; do you revert to ‘tried and true’ or do you seek out a new alternative? The first option is safer, it allows us to sleep easier at night for a period of time, but in the end will cause more damage to the organization than it could ever fix. The second is scary, it requires us to experiment.

Why are so many of us afraid of experimentation? The answer is really simple. Experimentation has at least one unknown variable (often times several) and we don’t know how those variables are going to react when we put them to the test. Thus, creating uncertainty, something most of us can’t stand.

There are two reasons our organizations need to start becoming more comfortable with experimentation.

One, you can’t produce anything new without trying new things. Duh, right? Well, I think we might be far more disconnected from this concept than we realize. When it feels like you’re beating your head against a sharp corner that’s usually the result of trying to get new outputs from the same old inputs…and the more you feel that feeling, chances are the less you’re experimenting with new concepts and ideas.

Two, there are very few things in the lifecycle of your organization that will stand the test of time. Values are about the only thing you’ve got that have a chance. Everything else will change, from personnel to processes and you have a choice to make, sit back and let change force itself upon you or proactively go out toward the leading edge.

If you’re ready to get rid of the pain that comes from lack of experimentation, it’s time to step out into that scary place of unknowns. There’s a few practical ways to help remove the fear and we’ll be discussing each one of these points in depth over the next two weeks, but this will get us started for now:

1. Embrace failure – By the nature of what experiments are you’re going to fail, a lot. We live in a culture where often perfection and excellence are the benchmarks. Somewhere along the way we decided to equate excellence with never making mistakes. Talk about setting yourself up for a letdown. Get over it!

2. Take good risks – Just because you’re going to fail with experimentation, doesn’t mean that you should start throwing fistfuls of money at every half-baked idea that comes down the pike. There’s going to be some great ones, some good ones and some really bad ones and they don’t all necessarily deserve the same level of attention. Proper experimentation should feel like well-controlled chaos.

3. Learn to capture value – A significant feature of innovation is improving people’s lives. Therefore, value only comes when your solution, product, or service meets real needs and desires in the marketplace. When this happens, you make your customers happy and you make money. You’ve just triggered commercial viability.

Much of this is counter-cultural, it might feel difficult at first, but if you want to break your organization’s addiction to ‘tried and true,’ there aren’t many other viable alternatives.