Today, the rate of change is at best staying the same and at worst getting faster. Organizations and teams that are not only surviving this rapid change but also growing as a result are the ones that prioritize agility and adaptability. Sometimes, there’s not only a clear solution, but there’s also not a clear problem to begin with. What then?
The answer comes down to not just understanding but acting upon the difference between a technical problem and an adaptive challenge. This looks like experimentation. At its core, experimentation drives innovation and helps us find creative solutions. It helps us to be able to build our agility muscle and to stay competitive, which at the end of the day is one of the goals for our organizations.
Source: How Do You Show Up With Uncertainty?
As we think about the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges, it’s no surprise that we’re bringing this front-of-mind this month when we’re focusing on all things failure. That’s part of experimentation, right? That you might get it right, and you also might get it wrong. Either way, it’s possible to move forward.
Knowing that failure is an inherent possibility when it comes to experimentation, why should you lean in? And what should you watch out for along the way? Let’s explore the traps and tips of creating a culture of experimentation.
Traps
As you consider embracing or growing a culture of experimentation, watch out for these traps along the way:
Assuming past success guarantees future success. When this is an underlying belief, teams and companies can stagnate—not innovating quickly enough, even to the point of being pushed out of the market. I’ve heard leaders say some version of, “If we can just keep these key clients, we’ll be fine.” What if those clients leave? Let me be explicit: there’s nothing wrong with nurturing what’s working well. In fact, do more of that. Just don’t do only that.
Penalizing failure. Whether this looks like moving too quickly, not giving your team enough time for their experiments to work, giving negative performance reviews when an idea doesn’t pan out, or any of the myriad ways leaders can show (and tell) their teams that it’s not safe to fail, penalizing failure is problematic. Rethinking failure in general—and understanding that there are different types of failure—can be helpful here. For more on the types, including a deep drive into the concept of intelligent failure, I encourage you to check out our podcast interview with Dr. Amy Edmonson, author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. I’m still thinking about things I learned weeks later! Here are the cliff notes:
- Basic failure: You were distracted and moving too fast. It didn’t work out.
- Complex failure: A series of things go wrong, leading to catastrophic failure. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.
- Intelligent failure: You took an educated guess, looked at the data, and made an informed, thoughtful decision. It didn’t work out—but you learned.
Not being intentional. When we talk about experimentation, we’re not talking about “just throw anything against the wall.” Instead, we should be exploring questions like: What data can we use? What questions should we be asking? Who should we be talking to? A lot of times in organizations, people will make decisions who aren’t necessarily closest to the processes.
Overlooking or minimizing lessons. One of the biggest traps we see is simply not recognizing and sharing the lessons/learning post-experimentation—whether the experiment was successful or an intelligent failure. In fact, especially when an experiment is unsuccessful, it’s still successful. Your organization learned something, right? Don’t forget to share that with your team so they can see it’s safe to fail through having that modeled.
Tips
Remember, in experimentation, the goal isn’t to get it right. The goal is to learn. Let’s look at some tips to do just that:
Normalizing the act of challenging the status quo. Create a safe environment for your team to ask questions like: How might we do X, Y, and Z? Yes, we’ve tried it like this before, and it didn’t work. If we were to do it again, what would we do differently? What are we not considering? If this is going to fall apart, where is it going to fall apart? Doing this curiosity exercise helps build the muscle of continuous learning, which we know is so critical to growth.
Celebrating failures. (And again, we’re not talking about preventable failures here.) One of my favorite practices is to lead a failure competition with groups, which centers around whoever had the most glorious, epic failure. (Hint: They win!) The point of this exercise is never to shame. Instead, it’s always to encourage folks to embrace their intelligent failure and share what they learned. One of the things I really appreciate about Dr. Amy Edmondson’s work is this idea that the experiments you are running should be big enough to be necessary to gather the data you need. That doesn’t mean you’re going to overhaul the whole system and potentially impact thousands of people, but it does mean defining what types of thoughtful experiments you can run. Then, celebrate them when they work out—and when they don’t!
Embracing the language of failure. Words have power, so it’s no coincidence that some of the tools we use to create a culture of experimentation involve language. For instance, practice saying, “We’re going to try out Version One, even though we know it might change. And when it changes, we’re going to learn from it. We can’t get the results and impact of Version Ten without Version One.”
What’s Next?
Where and when in your life are you comfortable running experiments? When and where are you not? What would one small, intentional, thoughtful act look like to test your assumptions and see what you learn? I invite you to reflect on these questions. And, as always, if you need guidance or thought partnership on your way to creating a culture of experimentation using our proprietary Model of Perpetual Learning, we’ve got your back.
Want more? Read: How to Embrace an Experimenter’s Mindset or listen to Episode 058: A Conversation on Readiness for Change with Dr. Teresa Peterson.
Sarah Noll Wilson is on a mission to help leaders build and rebuild teams. She aims to empower leaders to understand and honor the beautiful complexity of the humans they serve. Through her work as an Executive Coach, an in-demand Keynote Speaker, Researcher, Contributor to Harvard Business Review, and Bestselling Author of “Don’t Feed the Elephants”, Sarah helps leaders close the gap between what they intend to do and the actual impact they make. She hosts the podcast “Conversations on Conversations”, is certified in Co-Active Coaching and Conversational Intelligence, and is a frequent guest lecturer at universities. In addition to her work with organizations, Sarah is a passionate advocate for mental health.
