Tag Archives: Experiment

Smarter Risk Taking

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Smarter Risk Taking

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

After founding ImagineNation™ in Israel, I invested a year of my time and considerable money in taking what I thought were smart risks to invent an experiential business game. This involved collaborating with one of the top game design companies to co-create a live business simulation incorporating innovative gamification elements intending to teach corporations how to be innovative.

To my shock and surprise at the time, my invention initially failed!

Despite being an adult and experiential learning specialist and having designed and facilitated hundreds of corporate learning games for some of Australia’s top 100 companies over twenty-five years. It felt really horrible, and it was a visceral, heartbreaking, shameful and ego-destroying experience that I would not want anyone, anywhere, ever to experience.

Deep Learning Experience

Yet, it became a profound learning experience, enabling me to understand how:

  • My imposter syndrome played a significant self-sabotaging role. It did not set me up for success, nor did it set me up for maximising the importance of self-efficacy and self-mastery when on an innovation roller-coaster ride.
  • I had not undertaken sufficient research studies to determine if users wanted and were ready to accept such a radical innovation. Nor had I noticed how much the corporate learning market was being disrupted by technology, causing significant time and budget constraints, that I had neglected to address.
  • I had not paused long enough to consider, anticipate, plan and mitigate the risks involved in prototyping a viable minimal product in a new market.
  • I had not considered the risks involved with collaborating with a new consulting partner and co-facilitator, as well as with a new client. Nor anticipated how to resolve the values conflict that erupted when the project failed.
  • I had not fully understood the process involved in iterating and pivoting a new invention and the time it would take to produce a commercially viable product that the market would understand, be ready for, and respond to.

Finally, it seems that I had unconsciously fallen victim to the innovative start-up entrepreneur’s curse – falling in love with my product!

This was generated by my excitement, enthusiasm and energy of the possibilities rather than balancing these courageously and compassionately with the:

  • Harsh realities to be innovative.
  • Vital role of smart risk-taking and experimentation.
  • What ‘fails fast, to learn quickly’ really means at the heart (emotional), head (cognitive) and gut (visceral) levels.

Value of Failing Fast

They say that people need to teach what they need to learn themselves.

This valuable failure enabled me to invest the next ten years in learning to make sense of innovation and what it means to be innovative, including:

  • Helped me develop self-efficacy, trust my inner knowing and judgement, and make a stand for myself in the face of opposition and criticism I often received when presenting at a global conference on the people side of innovation, especially by process engineers.
  • Investing more attention, time in iterating and pivoting, testing and validating the two-day business simulation MVP to make it more tangible, simpler and teachable. 
  • Acknowledging that technology had accelerated sufficiently to accept that the original creative idea of a simple hybrid board game was the most valuable commercial option that could make the difference I wanted to make in the world. 
  • Becoming more patient, self-compassionate, and courageous in smart risk-taking and leading, coaching, and engaging in team innovation and continuous learning through various innovation, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial learning initiatives.

Iterating and Pivoting

I iterated, pivoted, and refined my intellectual property by presenting and bespoking the Coach for Innovators, Leaders and Teams Certified Program™ for over twelve years to global change-makers.

Most importantly, I reined in my competitive, risky and restless saboteur and focused on doing just one thing, which has finally morphed into a book, supported by a board game to teach people how to be innovative and develop an innovation mindset.

Taking Risks

In the fog of a globalised, disrupted, unpredictable and increasingly uncertain world, no innovation can progress, and no one can be innovative without smart risk-taking.

No innovation can improve without rigorous experimentation, where learning mainly happens by doing things to explore, discover, and know what not to do.  

Research has shown that most successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when implementing their initial plans, learned what would and would not work in the market, and conserved sufficient resources to have a second or third stab at getting it right.

Trial and Error and Cause and Effect

Innovation is a never-ending, risky, adaptive process involving trial and error and understanding cause and effect.

Because people are fearful of making mistakes and the negative consequences of failure, innovation requires leadership to develop both foresight and prospection skills to:

  • Empower and enable them to paradoxically take both a strategic and systemic perspective and a human-centred approach. 
  • Equip them to be innovative when designing business ventures and transformation initiatives that deliver commercially viable outcomes to successfully improve the quality of people’s lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Risk-taking is a Choice

In most businesses and organizations, innovation involves taking considerable risks, especially if seeking to enter a new market with a new product. It is compounded and resisted by many people in organizations because they are too focused on personal survival, personal gain, short-term gain and shareholder return.

Unfortunately, many organizations end up, paradoxically, undermining their organization’s capacity to be innovative, adapt, innovate and grow. Mainly due to their people being disengaged, resistant to change, lacking agency and being held back by bureaucracy and hierarchy that is averse to smart risk-taking and experimentation.

The Future is Permissionless

Because most people generally do not have permission, and are not allowed to make mistakes. They are not encouraged to try new things, so they become risk-averse, avoidant, oppositional and conventional, and don’t feel safe in deviating from the accepted way of doing things.

This is commonly known as the ‘status quo’ and drives people to comply with ‘what is’ (even when it no longer matters) and not apply their human ingenuity, be innovative and create new inventions from ‘what could be’ possible and through smart risk-taking to partner with AI in delivering innovative solutions in a disruptive world of complexity and unknowns.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Innovate Like Sherlock Holmes

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I am a fan of mysteries. I think they can train the brain to be a better innovator.

I’m currently re-reading the complete works of Sherlock Holmes. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes provides some great perspectives that everyone should consider.

After Holmes made some amazing deductions about Watson’s current state of affairs, Watson was shocked. When Holmes explained his thought process, Watson expressed disbelief.

Watson: When I hear you give your reasons, the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.

Holmes: Quite so. You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.

Watson: Frequently.

Holmes: How often?

Watson: Well, some hundreds of times.

Holmes: Then how many are there?

Watson: How many? I don’t know.

Holmes: Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps because I have both seen and observed.

As innovators, we need to do a better job of observing, not just seeing. We need to study what is really going on in the market, with our customers.

Unfortunately too often we just see without insight.

This will lead to a predicament that is described later in the story. Holmes is presented with a challenge, and Watson immediately wants to deduce the solution.

Watson: This is indeed a mystery. What do you imagine that it means?

Holmes: I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

This is brilliant! It describes a common mistake of innovators. We often get too attached to our ideas, and, therefore, ignore evidence that goes against our beliefs. This is why so many innovations fail.

Too often we twist the facts to suit our theories.

The reason is that as human beings we are subject to confirmation bias; the brain’s processing mechanism by which it finds evidence to support its belief structure. Whatever you believe, you will find evidence to support it, and you will subconsciously ignore anything that refutes it. That’s why we can have such powerful beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary.

We get too attached to our ideas, and therefore, we introduce innovations that are destined to fall flat.

Or as Scott Cook from Intuit so eloquently said, “For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.”

During your innovation efforts, think like Sherlock Holmes. Be sure to truly observe what is going on in the world around you. Use this to gather the necessary data. And, critically, avoid twisting your facts to support your beliefs.

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No Doesn’t Mean No

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

The other day I posted an article about innovation on LinkedIn. I was surprised to find a comment from someone I worked with at Accenture over 15 years ago. To paraphrase, he said…

No offense, but I remember at a meeting in London trying to demonstrate to you how (a specific software platform) could be a technology model for a social network site I designed for (a company) in 2000. I remember you absolutely annihilated me after for wasting your time. I was only a 23 year old hard working Irishman to London at the time with a head full of vision and innovation but zero resources and contacts except you as my manager. I’ve been very suspicious of any talk of innovation since.

My first reaction was, “Wow, I barely remember that conversation. I can’t believe that someone is still so upset so many years later.”

Although his comment was less about a comment on the content and more about a personal gripe with me, I realized that hidden in it were two important points related to innovation.

1) Everyone is subject to confirmation bias. If I did shoot down his idea, it might have been because I was blind to its potential. It might have been an amazing idea and I couldn’t see it. Our past experiences will always taint our view of what is possible in the future. And of course, I am not immune to this phenomenon.

2) Not all ideas are good ideas. People get attached to their ideas and beliefs and then blame everyone else when they don’t get implemented. The commenter too is subject to confirmation bias. If organizations implemented every idea they received, they would all be out of business. From my experience, only a small fraction of ideas are actually worthwhile.

Scott Cook from Intuit sums it up beautifully, “For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.” Everyone can justify their position.

Some believe their idea is the next million dollar concept and that everyone should love it and invest in it. But we know that 70% of innovations fail. And in other cases we shoot down an idea because we don’t think it is good. And sometimes this can lead to a different form a failure, as Kodak learned with the digital camera.

The key lesson is to be rigorous with your thinking. Never assume your ideas are good. And at the same time don’t immediately kill an idea that has potential. Experiment. Prove (or disprove) concepts in the real world. And if you are convinced your idea is awesome and you get a “no,” keep trying until you get a yes. Sometimes a “no” really means “not now.”

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Redefining Failure

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I view life as a series of experiments. When you look at it through this lens, failure means something completely different.

One definition of an experiment is: “A test or investigation, especially one planned to provide evidence for or against a hypothesis.”

The only way an experiment can fail is if you don’t get the evidence.

Even if the evidence proves your hypotheses was wrong, the experiment itself was a huge success.

When you view innovation through the lens of experimentation, it redefines failure.

When developing new ideas, the best approach (especially when there is “market” uncertainty) is to create small experiments that can be scaled over time.

The experiment can give you one of four outcomes:

  1. Our hypothesis was validated by the experiment. Let’s make a larger investment in a larger experiment.
  2. Our original hypothesis was wrong, but we found a different direction that looks promising. Let’s create a new experiment with the new hypothesis.
  3. Our original hypothesis was wrong and we should kill the idea.
  4. Our experiment did not give us enough data to determine whether or not the hypothesis was correct.

Of these four outcomes, only the last one is a failure. With the other three, the experiment was successful. It either confirmed that we are on the right path or it stopped us from making further investments.

The problem with some innovation efforts is that insufficient data is gathered throughout the process. Experimentation is not the mantra.

When you view innovation as a series of experiments, you must make sure that the experiments don’t fail. It is totally fine if your hypotheses are invalid, as long as you determine that early in the experimentation process.

P.S. One book I really like is “The Science of Success” by Charles Koch. The entire book is about how experimentation made Koch Industries one of the most innovative – and successful – companies in history.

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