10 guiding principles for teams running on experiments
What could be 10 guiding principles for teams turning to or running on experimentation? These are only suggestions / inspiration. Please add any comment, addition, edit or question in the comments.
- Be curious, hope to be surprised, willing to change your mind and committed to accept the results.
- Test everything that can be tested, acknowledge that small innovations can be extremely valuable.
- Cultivate a culture of ideas. Create a scaled system that captures, assesses and analyses every idea at close to no cost, risk or time.
- Organize for experimentation. Experimentation and analysis is a team effort. Results must be available and accessible to everyone. A team needs a shared language and understanding of the meaning of the outcome of their experiment on the customer, the problem and the solution (business).
- Build for velocity turning insights-into-action at speed. The success of an experiment is not measured in its ability to create information but its ability to immediately influence new actions and behaviors.
- The purpose of experimentation is learning. There is no failure in experimentation, only learning.
- Transparency, trust and sharing is at the heart of the team. We are not the only ones learning or the only to benefit from our own experiments. An experimentation driven team ads their insights to the stream of learnings flowing through the organization.
- What is the cheapest, fastest way to get to the next data-point? What is the minimum investment to get to future evidence as fast as possible?
- Experimentation is ideas management. Allow every idea to be evaluated and kill bad ideas quickly.
- Our ideas are bound by our ability to combine (creativity) our existing shared information and experiences. By acquiring new information through rapid experimentation we are increasing the teams ability to develop new ideas.
Sources: Experimentation Works, Stefan H. Thomke, Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Dave Snowden and friends — Organizational Design, Burn the Business Plan, Carl Schramm, Thinking in systems, Donella Meadows, The Age of Agile, Steve Denning, Messy, Tim Harford Originals, Adam Grant