Building a Culture of Experimentation in your organisation

In the mid-20th century, Bell Labs , the research and development company of the well-known American telephone company AT&T, embarked on an ambitious project that would eventually lay the groundwork for the digital age. With a team of brilliant minds, they pursued research in areas that seemed, at the time, to be purely academic or driven by mere curiosity. The invention of the transistor in 1948 not only led to developments in telephony, but fundamentally created the IT industry we have today, and became the building block of all modern electronics – from early computers that filled entire rooms to the smartphones we carry in our pockets.

?While the Physics Nobel Prize winning invention of this semiconductor device, and all the machines we have created from it have come to revolutionize the way we live, work, and communicate, perhaps the most important invention Bell Labs gave the world was the practice of industrialized experimentation. The perspective of open exploration and providing people freedom to experiment is an empowering thing for people. One of my favorite quotes from this time is that of Frank B. Jewett, an early Engineer at AT&T and first President at Bell Labs. He said the industrial lab “is merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated.”

Bell Labs’ legacy teaches us some powerful lessons that still ring through today: the greatest innovations often stem from the freedom to explore the unknown, to ask “what if?”. And by bringing together the most intelligent minds, with their unconstrained creative capacity, into facilities where they can experiment without fear of failure to figure out the “how”, world changing inventions have a higher chance of happening.?

Building a culture of experimentation

Over the past year in my role leading the Prototyping & Customer Engineering team in Asia Pacific & Japan, having met with many customers all over the region, I have learned something quite fundamental to invention. The key to actualizing invention is to experiment more, and in order to do that you must not only lower the cost of failure but instill a culture of experimentation across the entire organization, not just with IT and engineering.

Most customers I have met recognize the need to innovate quickly, however they often lack the skills, methods, and sometimes willingness to shoulder the risk of experimentation. Skills are an essential foundation, according to a report by Gallup and AWS, around three-quarters (76%) of organizations in Asia-Pacific that have workers with advanced digital skills have introduced new, innovative products in the last two years, compared with 45% of organizations with lower levels of digital skills. However that’s really just the beginning, as there needs to be a framework to support that group of people. You see these inventors are not just engineers and software developers, but include business owners, analysts, and operators. Together they march toward invention using this framework.

Through our own journey of experimentation, and after working with hundreds of AWS customers, we have pioneered a methodology for experimentation which has proven to work remarkably well.

Ideation & Scoping

Any new experiment starts with diving deep into a customer’s business to understand the most persistent problems or ambitious opportunities that transforms their company, or even their industry. These could be almost anything, like how to process our customer claims in a quarter of the time, or how to reduce the frustration of our users while they are trying to interact with you. While the challenges can vary in size or scale, they invariably are always grounded in how they affect customers experice with your product or service. And the owner in the business unit responsible for that experince must not only be involved, but have a vested interest in improving it.

By assembling people with both the business knowledge and technical skills, and ideating together intently on a specific and challenging “big rocks ” that redefines a business process, improves internal productivity or a newly conceived customer experience, those ideas start to become real and the alignment between stakeholders becomes solidified.

Experimentation

The next phase is rolling up your sleeves and getting hands-on. This involves scoping use cases appropriately to represent those customer interactions and building a prototype – early samples of a product or application, enabling you to validate and test ideas before spending valuable resources launching solutions into real-world production.

By practically applying new and emerging technologies like machine learning, generative AI, spatial computing and robotics, this phase allows you to think about solving those challenges in unique or novel ways, and observe if gains and improvements can be made. In this phase, it is important to recognize failures quickly, often in days not weeks or months, and pivot if necessary to new approaches if it is not working out.

Retrospecting on those learnings regularly as a group, evaluating the pros and cons, and undderstanding whether they are one-way or two-way doors allows you to move quickly to the next phase of learning.

Scaling Discoveries

Sharing the outcomes of your experiments and prototypes with business stakeholders helps them not only understand if problems can be solved, but is a powerful way to build confidence and persist with it by moving to a pilot or even straight to production. With the objective validation of ideas done, it initiates productive conversations like how much time, productvity or money it will save if we rolled it out to our entire organization, how fast can we build it, and hopefully how many more experiments like these in other departments.

Giving people not only the tools for rapid experimentation, but also the methodology to practically apply it in their organizations is hugely empowering, and implementing it at scale across an organization transforms how they think, behave and act when problems and new opportunities arise. With business leaders encouraging this way of invention, over time, the culture changes to being more nimble and ultimately positions the company to lead through innovation rather than follow.

Getting Started

To get inspired about the “Art of the Possible” and what leading edge innovation AWS is doing with other customers, I recommend following the AWS Prototyping & Cloud Engineering group on LinkedIn. We publish amazing stories each week about some really thought provoking ways in which customers are apply new and emerging technologies in novel ways to create new experiences. We also feature some really cool videos and demos where you can see these experiences in action.

In mid March this year, we launched a new AWS Builder Studio in Melbourne , the second after New York and the first in the southern hemisphere. This new 350sqm facility is the latest investment by Amazon Web Services to inspire customers and partners of all sizes, and from all industries, to build with AWS technologies in an immersive environment, accelerate experimentation, and develop new breakthrough solutions for society. The Innovation showroom showcases several demonstrations to draw inspiration from such as SmartSpace which utilizes spatial computing to provide 3D interactive visualization of spaces, and a Smart Factory that uses the Internet of Things to improve the productivity of manufacturing facilities. ?The Collaboration spaces provide the perfect environment to brainstorm ideas, ideate around tables and whiteboards to get “into the weeds” of your ideas, or just have informal discussions with other innovators. ?The fully equipped Workshop and on-site hardware like AWS Outpost provide you with the resources to get hands-on to prototype, fabricate components such as electronic circuit boards, test and deliver working products. The new AWS Builder Studio also gives you a new way to connect with AWS’s Prototyping and Cloud Engineering Team, by working together on an experiment over a three-to-six-week engagement centered around Amazon’s unique culture of innovation methodology. Working backwards from customers’ needs, this approach helps organizations identify a business opportunity or challenge and apply AWS technologies, skills, and methodologies to rapidly experiment with new solutions.

Finally, for those of you attending AWS Summit’s around Asia Pacific this year, we will be featuring “Culture of Experimentation” sessions in the agenda. You will hear from myself and other leaders about how to practically apply the methodologies I have discussed in this blog as well as hear directly from our customers about how they have successfully transitioned the culture within their companies to accelerate experimentation. I look forward to seeing as many of you there for our first one at the ExecLeaders Summit in Sydney on 11th April.

Over the coming months we’ll be sharing more about infusing the culture of experimentation in your organization, and am looking forward to connecting with as many people as possible throghout my travels this year.