Experimenting into Tomorrow

Welcome to Love Mondays More: the weekly Linkedin newsletter that delves deeper into the ideas and concepts driving my Love Mondays newsletter series .

Why ‘Love Mondays’? Mondays are usually anything but lovable. Studies show it’s typically our week’s low point and Guinness World Records has even dubbed it the "worst day of the week”. So I aim to provide a 4-minute caffeine hit of content to fire up the other 10,076 minutes of your week and stave off the Monday malaise. Don’t just live Mondays, Love Mondays!

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but we do know change is the only constant, and organisations and teams are in a constant dance to adapt, innovate, and lead. So, how do we craft strategies that ride, not resist, change? How do we anticipate the next disruption and navigate AI's surge ? How do we secure our foothold in the ever-changing landscape, maintaining relevance and competitive strength?

Paul Graham, the visionary behind Y Combinator , a celebrated start-up accelerator, offers a nugget of wisdom that resonates beyond the start-up sphere. His advice to "Live in the future, then build what's missing" has fuelled the creation of game-changing ventures like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit. It involves generating concepts from a vantage point of future potential rather than current constraints. And this mindset isn't confined to startups or tech – it spans industries and disciplines.

But even the brightest ideas need real-world testing. Here's where the rubber meets the road: experimentation . It's about rolling up our sleeves, getting hands-on, and giving our ideas room to breathe and evolve.

Trial, Error, Triumph

In a recent article ‘The Power of Experimentation ’, authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini highlight that experimentation isn’t just about trying new things; it's a mindset that encourages learning from successes and failures. They champion the integration of extensive grassroots experimentation as a proactive shield against the looming threat of irrelevance. Hamel and Zanini's call to action resonates deeply in a world evolving at lightning speed.

“Life doesn’t sit still, it doesn’t wait for a catastrophe, it doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t plan - it just tries stuff. The same needs to be true of your organisation. That means letting people be as experimental at work as they are in the rest of their lives.” - Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

Canva is one organisation that has embraced this ethos wholeheartedly. Catie Takimoto, Creative Lead at Canva explains “At Canva, we believe in taking risks and empowering our team to tackle big goals and solve problems that have never been solved before. Although failure can have a negative connotation, I see it as a normal part of the iterative process. When things don’t go as planned, we learn as much or sometimes more than when they do. As we like to say, we’re building a rocket ship as we fly it!”. Another example is Inuit , where the role of an entrepreneur is embraced by every employee. Each individual is encouraged to innovate, devise, and actively seek novel and improved methods to solve their customer’s problems.

Entrepreneurs I have the privilege of working with often discuss how innovation isn't solely about chasing that one elusive idea. It's more about embracing the journey of exploring ten thousand ideas, even if most of them hit dead ends. Breathing life into an idea doesn't always have to demand complexity, high risks, or extravagant costs – you can scale it up or down as you see fit.

The beauty of small-scale experiments lies in their abundance – you can run a multitude of them, increasing your odds of discovering the gems amidst the stones. Through these experiments, creativity sparks, individuals are empowered, and a culture of improvement thrives.?

Ready to start experimenting? A structured process can be incredibly valuable if you're eager to turn your ideas into tangible experiments. To guide you on this journey, consider the Experiment Plan and Results Template offered by Optimizely , a leading experimentation platform.

When I was writing ‘The Leading Edge ’ and bringing the Epic Leadership Challenge to life, I relied on the five-stage design thinking model . Born from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford , this approach is widely employed in product development and offers a structured path to innovation. If you haven’t come across it before, try testing it out in whatever area you’re working on or trying to create change:

1. Empathise - Learn about the audience for whom you are designing to better understand the problem or test your assumptions.
2. Define - Pull together all the information generated in Empathise step to construct a point of vviewpointusers’ needs and insights.
3. Ideate - Brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. Start logically and then create the space to allow for alternative solutions to problems.
4. Prototype - Build a representation of one or more of your ideas to show to others (NB. This does not have to be complicated! It can be as simple as a sketch. In today’s Love Mondays I’ve challenged readers to fire up their rapid experimentation thinking with a simple sketch).
5. Test ?- Return to your original user group and test your ideas for feedback.

To establish a thriving culture of experimentation within your organisation, consider the following steps:

1. Be more conscious: Cultivate a culture where curiosity is celebrated and employees feel empowered to propose and explore new ideas without fear of failure.
2. Be more willing: Embrace regular small-scale experiments , recognising their potential for valuable insights.
3. Be more proactive: Stay ahead of the game by anticipating future trends and changes, and actively identifying how you could adapt to them to maintain your edge and relevance.
4. Be more inclined: Embrace a "Test and Learn" approach - enthusiastically engage in diverse design sprints with varying strategies and ideas, capturing data from each trial to guide your subsequent moves.

Thank you for being a part of Love Mondays More! If this edition resonated with you, get ready for an extra 3-minute dose of Monday inspiration and motivation straight to your inbox. Don't miss out on the chance to make every Monday a day to look forward to!