Test and learn
I love hanging around musicians. I love their energy and perspectives that are different from mine. That’s why I was hanging out in a music studio on a fine summer day a few years ago while a recording session was underway.
The band had been going for an hour or so when they got into a disagreement about how to play one of the songs. One band member thought they should play it one way. Another disagreed. They debated. Other members joined in. Hands were thrown in the air. Then the recording engineer leaned into his microphone.
“Gentlemen,” he intoned in a marvelous deep bass voice.
The musicians quieted down and looked toward the control booth.
“Play it both ways and pick the one you like best.” He paused for a couple of beats. “That way maybe we can all be home by Christmas.”
The musicians laughed. They played the piece one way, then the other way. Most of them liked the second version. They modified it a little and the session continued. We were all out of there by dinner time, with months to spare before Christmas.
Try it, don’t talk about it
When you’ve got a difference of opinion about what to do, you can debate your options forever. Or, you can experiment.
Most of the time, trying things out will give you better answers faster than debating what to do. As a bonus, tests resolve debates and make it easier for every team member to support the action.
Test your way to innovation
Experiments can help you keep the innovation fires burning. When a team member brings you an idea, don’t spend precious time talking about why it will or won’t work. Instead say, “How can we test this?” and go from there.
Bosses bottom line
Live trials beat debates for decision-making and innovation.
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Image by John Payne
A great post Wally, we are really bad at learning from our mistakes and quite often it seems to me that we would far rather not do anything and not learn anything than try something and fail. Isn’t it odd that we are so scared of failure and never see the learning upside. Why is that?
Thanks for the kind words, Phil. I think that schools and battalions of bosses, added to a bit of human nature set us up to be afraid of getting caught doing something that doesn’t work. How many times have you seen a manager punished when a try doesn’t work, even though it was well-intentioned and well thought out?
Hi Wally,
Hear! hear! Testing and learning. I wish we could see more of this. There’s too much talk about agile rather than just being and doing agile.
Adrian
I absolutely agree, Adrian.
Hello James,
On one engagement I was told something like this by a client “We have achieved more in one week working with you then we achieved with the wider team for the last four months!”
What was the difference between me and the bigger team? The members of the bigger team had been listing the different approaches, debating merits, conducting desk based research, more debating, more analysis….. Whereas, I came in considered the situation. Put forward one approach (that seemed the best to me) and said something like “Let’s try this out for one week” and see what we learn. Then we can take it from there. If it works great. If it doesn’t work then we will generate learning – learning that we can use to come up with a better approach.
What allowed me to take that course of action? Physics. My degree course was in Applied Physics. How does one go about doing applied physics? Conducting experiments, and learning from one experiment to design the next experiment…..
Interestingly what comes naturally to me is not at all natural or desirable in large organisations. Folks in large organisations want the one guaranteed method for producing the desired outcome. Great for what is tried and tested. Not feasible for the instances where one finds oneself in new territory.
All the best
maz
Very true Maz, we are far more worried about minimising loss than creating learning.