This song just came to my mind writing this account

How to keep the experimentation spirit alive in your organisation?

You’ve managed, usually through some combination of carrot, stick and and other methods to convince your team, coworkers or managers that running experiment is a great way to reduce the associated risk with a project, product, service etc.

You’ve even managed, if you’re lucky, to have them run more than one experiment and now you have a bunch of people who have seen the value of this approach, how it works and what it can bring to the business in terms of decision making ability & learnings.

But how do you ensure that this new mindset, this exploratory streak is nurtured and spread across the organisation? Or at least not killed by the dominant culture?

We discussed this at the Lean Startup Conference Berlin 2019 Un-conference session I was fortunate to facilitate.

For those who don’t know, an ‘un-conference’ is a user-generated conference, where topics are crowdsourced upfront and the sessions pitched which get enough votes are organised and collaboratively run.

Within our group of about 25 people, many had not yet run experiments but fortunately we had a select few who had so we could collectively come up with some learnings around this topic, which I’m sharing here.

1. The benefits of running experiments and growing its associated mindset

On the business

• Experiments being usually simple and fast to setup, it’s a great way to de-risk and save money
• They help everyone make decision made on facts rather than opinions or guesses — the famous ‘data driven decision making’ — this usually speeds things up.

On the mindset & culture

• Increases focus — when you start running experiments, you need to identify your riskiest assumptions which requires you to unpack your idea or solution and hence helps you focus on what really matters. Often it’s the moment you realise you may be looking at the problem the wrong way or have missed an important aspect so whether you run 0 or 10 experiments, you’ve already gained a lot of clarity in the process.
• Increases the BS detector of people and makes them highly sensitive to data vs. facts => Measuring and gathering evidence is now the core focus.
• It promotes an “outside the box attitude”, teams have to get creative to find ways to test things and learn to challenge themselves, this moves away from the execution culture and fosters exploration.
• It’s fun and stimulating for teams (although I would argue when all experiments are invalidated, it can get depressing, still, most people I’ve worked with enjoy them)

2. What prevents this culture to spread or survive after a project is closed

• Reducing risks is great for the business but it also means that once the project risk has reached an acceptable, they go into execution mode and can quickly loose the exploration spirit and regain their biases. This can also reduce the sense of urgency and hence the allocation of ressources.
• In some organisations, it’s a minority of people who run these experiments and sometimes a specific departement (think ‘innovation team’), limiting coverage and causing isolation.
• Leadership doesn’t always understand the value of constantly running experiments. Often, it’s still seen as a ‘let’s derisk this big hairy uncertain project’ and they don’t always realise it can benefit most activities within the organisation — as an example, I have a client — manager of the innovation ecosystem — who runs experiments on things like ‘should they have a newsletter’ or ‘should we have training on topic X’ — and only builds the solution if she sees enough traction in the experiments). The risk is limited but the value in terms of ressources spent and customer satisfaction is high.

3. What can be done to address this?

We agreed as a group that we didn’t have all the answers but we identified some topics to explore :

Always consider the business angle

• Start by questioning what problem is being addressed, how much it currently costs the business to not solve it or solve it imperfectly as a way to frame the need.
• Show the value of experiments as a great source of metrics for your leaders (think OKR, North Star metrics etc), to ensure buy-in and long term commitment to changing the way projects are run.

Build a supporting culture

• Focus on learnings vs. outcomes, make it saf(er) to fail for teams (or business owners). This ties very well back to a talk delivered in the main conference by Anuj Adhiya on keeping up the cadence and morale.

Anuj’ talk the next day was a perfect complement to these learnings

Support the people

• Build a community by promoting things like peer learning
• Consider swapping people around or mixing up delivery and innovation people.
• Review the current HR performance review so that it aligns with this new way of working
• Have dedicated days or physical space or both
• Support each employee’s growth as an individual, helping them identify their strengths, increasing their self-awareness and as a result what they could grow or reinforce

What we found and I’m sharing here isn’t exhaustive but it’s a pretty good start for a 45 mins discussion!

Thank you to all the participants of the session !