Discovering Experimental Discovery
The concepts of experimental discovery and creative destructions are not necessarily intuitive. Imagine that you’re on top of the world, selling a fantastic product and earning healthy profits. You did it! You accomplished something that thousands of people try, and fail, to do. You won at capitalism!
Fast forward 12 months (maybe a few more or less). You are still trying to sell the same gadget that was last year’s “must have” item. You’re putting a new marketing spin on things. You’re targeting a new audience (it was once my job to help a company find a new audience for its rapidly tanking product). Meanwhile, an upstart competitor (or your old nemesis) is knocking your socks off in the marketplace. Their products seem to have anticipated customer demand.
How did they do it?!?
Clearly, a number of factors may have contributed to the preceding scenario. One that makes a lot of sense, though, is that they were practicing experimental discovery. While you were asking your customers what they wanted, they were trying to solve their customers’ problems; taking prototypes straight to customers, learning from their mistakes, and coming back with better products each time. While you were enjoying your year of profitability, they realized that the market could be a completely different place in 12 months. They looked for ways to destroy and recreate their products, while you marveled at the beauty of yours (and why shouldn’t you… you won at capitalism!).
Shifting gears… Many of the readers of this blog work for nonprofit organizations. Your story may be a bit different, and that’s actually what I want to focus on here. It may not be healthy profits that drive you to complacency, and it’s not the chance for future profits that drives you to employ experimental discovery. I believe that this makes it more important that you discover experimental discovery. There is still so much to be discovered about how to change the world in the ways your organization aspires to change it, but the lack of profit signals might make it less likely that you’ll notice when those opportunities exist. A rigorous, disciplined approach to experimental discovery can improve the likelihood that you will notice those opportunities.
Here’s a quick exercise (please post your responses in the comments):
- You believe that what people (the general public) think and feel matters in determining the degree of economic freedom enjoyed in a given place.
- You want to increase the desire for economic freedom amongst the general public.
How do you take an experimental approach in attempting to reach your goal?
I think that Program Theory plays a huge role in experimental discovery. In order to know if your experiment is successful, you have to know what outcomes to measure. Confusing outputs and outcomes is a major challenge in the experimental discovery process.
Once your organization has clearly identified appropriate outcomes, outputs and activities, then it’s time to focus on experimental discovery. I believe that the driver of this process is the organizational culture. There must be an entrepreneurial spirit shared by both “management” and “labor.” Ideally everyone thinks of themselves as an entrepreneurial owner and is constantly thinking of new experiments to run in the pursuit of the organizational vision.
Reasonable failure must also be celebrated. Failure must be seen as an opportunity to learn and improve, and it must be recognized that each time one fails one is that much closer to success. Think of Edison, Dyson, etc – if failure was seen as failure, we wouldn’t have electricity or awesome vacuums.
@Morgan Polotan: VERY awesome vacuums.
I like your thinking on this, so let’s go down that path. If the long-term outcome is increased economic freedom (a change in social conditions), and the short-term outcome is “increase the desire for economic freedom amongst the general public,” what experiments help me discover how to get there?