Reasons why experimentation is critical to your business

Does your organisation promote or demote experimentation?

A curious mindset is a prerequisite for experimentation. To define a thesis, we need to embrace the possibilities. However, an inquisitive mind can be unconsciously stifled by stale statements like “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or worse still, “we’ve always done it this way!”.

Beyond passive avoidance, organisations can actively suppress experimentation by considering curious people as disruptors who “just want to rock the boat”.

Francesca Gino, who wrote ‘Why Curiosity Matters’, found that of 3,000 employees, only 24% reported feeling curious in their jobs regularly, and about 70% said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.

Teams who work within a culture of experimentation have the freedom to be curious and generate alternative solutions. They avoid confirmation bias enabling them to consider many different perspectives to achieve better outcomes for an organisation.

If you want innovation, you need experimentation.

Experimentation, learning and innovation are intrinsically linked. 

The more we experiment, the more we fail.
The more we fail, the more we learn.
The more we learn, the more we know.
The more we know, the more we can innovate.

Innovation is derived from failure, and we don’t fail, and therefore learn, unless we experiment. To promote new value and growth across an organisation, we need to cultivate a culture of experimentation.

However, even avoiding failure is sometimes out of your control. The phrase “you don’t know what you don’t know” is ever apparent when your organisation serves a constantly shifting market. By embracing an experimental-based approach to our work, our teams are set up to operate effectively in a complex market.

Use experimentation to empower high-performing teams.

To avoid leading a team with a micro-management mindset, encouraging experimentation can help put the power of decision-making back into the hands of the group.

Let’s say we’ve tasked a team with solving a problem. Instead of defaulting to the team lead for answers, they run an experiment to test multiple possible solutions. The results of that experiment allow the team to discover the best outcome for the business.

Spotify Health Check model ranks teams as “Pawns or Players”. Suggesting a better result for the business is when the team has control of their destiny rather than just being pawns in a chess game.

Additionally, a team can collectively ideate more options by creating an equal team environment where everyone is encouraged to present their ideas. 

Data-Driven decisions improve accountability and trust.

Making decisions promptly, both large and small, is critical to the success of a business. Findings come from the need to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. 

As a coach, I often see team members look to the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or the most senior team member to make the decisions. This approach puts unfair pressure on those who make the decisions and takes power away from the team, making them less accountable.

Experimentation will provide reliable quantitative data to help teams arrive at more definitive outcomes, which are more likely to last the test of time than a decision made on a gut feeling. 

Data-driven choices may also help eliminate conflicts of interest, reducing second-guessing and concerns on the way to an outcome.

Experimentation promotes psychological safety.

Over the last few years, I’m happy to say I’ve seen organisations put people at the centre of what they do by moving towards a more human-centred business model. They reduce hierarchies, encourage self-managed teams, adopt organisation models like holacracy and, most importantly, ensure psychological safety.

Psychological safety is the belief that we won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Experimentation can create psychological safety in the workplace by:

1. Normalising failure by providing a “safe to fail” environment allows teams to try new things, gather feedback and evidence, and review results against a hypothesis. 
2. Building confidence through experimentation provides a foundation from which to make decisions safely. The more decisions a team makes, the more confident they feel to continue to make decisions. 

By creating a psychologically safe environment, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle complex problems and diversity of thought.

Use experimentation to drive change.

Change is hard. Many transformations fail because change is pushed onto an organisation unprepared to manage change. Experimentation is a great way to support change in a less confronting way where teams “pull” change into their environments rather than having it “pushed” onto them.

For example, I supported a team working in a three-week sprint cycle. I asked the group to consider a two-week sprint cycle because it’s easier to plan and has a shorter feedback loop. The team hit me with a barrage of reasons as to why it was not feasible. So I took a different tact – I asked whether they would like to run an experiment where they operate in two-week sprints for a month to see if they could perhaps solve some of those issues preventing them from moving to a two-week sprint cycle. This option was far more digestible to them, and when the experiment was over, the team decided to continue the two-week sprint cycle.

Use Experimentation to Navigate a Complex World

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin sense-making framework supports the notion that experimentation helps organisations navigate a highly complex marketplace. Experimentation helps them discover what they don’t know they don’t know. Most organisations are good at finding ways to know what they know they don’t know, but they are not as well equipped at figuring out what they don’t know they don’t know – and today that is most of it. The only way to navigate it is to probe-sense-respond and that requires experimentation.

How to create a culture of experimentation

Encouraging a culture of experimentation doesn’t have to be difficult and should be fun and energising. Things to try and get the ball rolling could include; 

• Make experimentation a part of the organisation’s DNA. For example, experimentation results in status reporting.
• Allow time for experimentation
• Teach teams the fundamentals of running experiments. Hypothesis, method, results, analysis and conclusions.
• As a leader, stop answering questions, and ask, “What do you think?” 
• Reward experimentation failures as well as successes
• Establish norms for how failure is managed, i.e., focus on learning.

Takeaway

Encouraging experimentation creates engaged, high-performing teams who invite change and have structured learning from failures. 

If you take one thing from this article, I hope it’s akin to Thomas Edison’s quote, “I have not failed, I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”

Need help?

EPiC is a transformation specialist, and we have experienced enterprise coaches who can help your organisation through this journey. Get in touch and let us know what problems you’re facing, and we’ll see if we can help.