Power of Experimentation
Olga Pavlenko
Head of Supply chain & Procurement. Bringing Innovation to life through flawless Supply chain execution. Inspirational & Inclusive Leader, Mentor, Certified Coach.
What a wonderful visit to a newly opened Lindt Home of Chocolate museum in Kilchberg, Switzerland! Joy of making a chocolate teddy bear during the masterclass, combined with an enlightening story of chocolate creation.
Did you know that while people have consumed chocolate for over 2000 years, only recently the product got its flavor and texture, which we enjoy today. And all that thanks to the vision, persistence and many years of endless experimenting of two people: Rodolphe Lindt, whom we owe an invention of the Conching process and Daniel Peter, who came up with the idea of mixing cocoa with condensed milk, creating the first milk chocolate.
After having recently read the book "Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them" by Gary Hamel, I felt inspired to use the examples from the exhibition to talk about the importance of experimenting to my daughter and her friend. After a moment of consideration, my daughter asked: "Mon, does this mean, that you would now be more open to not only useful experimenting like backing at home, but also not very useful one like making slime?".
No one is better at blind-spot spotting than your own kids! We often think that our knowledge, experience and title give us a power to place effective judgement on "useful or useless" innovation efforts. Can we create any breakthrough by applying conventional wisdom, or is this something which really limits us? As Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand".
Both at home and professionally we often live in environments where the penalties of getting things wrong are higher than the penalties sitting on your hands, and it is tempting to defend timidity as prudence. As we are getting into the magical period of end of the year celebrations, let’s allow ourselves to lift these self-imposed boundaries and get our imagination flowing!