Principled Innovation LLC

What it means to experiment…

July 27th, 2008

The need for associations to engage in active experimentation is a regular thread woven into my writings, and so I encourage you read an excellent post on the subject written by leading innovation author Scott Berkun on his Harvard Business blog.  Here’s a sample:

Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It’s that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.

The problem is that most business managers hate experiments. They want guaranteed returns. Predictable profits. Introducing uncertainty works against what they’re trying to do. The comedy is that whatever profits they’re talking about protecting originated from the founders of the company doing a huge experiment: starting a new company.

Make note that a real experiment necessarily entails the risk that comes with not knowing what the outcome will be.  It isn’t an experiment if you already know what you’re going to get.  And, as Berkun points out in his post, our organizations and many of their activities reflect past experiments launched to answer specific questions about what was possible.  The problem is that we have become so comfortable within the status quo we’ve created that we no longer see experimentation as an intentional learning act.  It simply feels like risk taking, a threatening practice that has become anathema to our organizations and their leaders.

This is one of the reasons why I disagree with the recent observations of Jeffrey Phillips, another highly-regarded innovation author and blogger, on the outsourcing of innovation, at least insofar as his argument pertains to associations.  I don’t want associations to outsource their innovation efforts because the capabilities and learnings those efforts will generate going forward are simply too integral to strategic success to reside outside of our organizations.  Among those capabilities is effective experimentation, and among the learnings is how to intelligently manage measured risk taking and the realities of failure.

Despite our reluctance to embrace it, I remain convinced that innovation will eventually help us secure a more vibrant future for the association community.  Perhaps if we can start experimenting more authentically, we can begin to build toward this future for ourselves and our successors.

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