Test, don’t judge ideas

Working on something and wondering how it will be received? 

It’s so easy to swing into judgement mode and decide how it’s going to end up. 

That they won’t buy it. 
That they won’t like it. 
That they don’t need it. 
That they won’t understand it. 

And we haven’t even tested it out yet! 

We can spend a lot of energy thinking and rethinking, assessing and judging. But we may not be the best judges of the things we make ourselves. 

Much better to test our ideas out on people... the people who we are working with or targeting with our ideas. 

Otherwise we may think what we’ve done isn’t good enough.

Until we’ve tested it out, it could be better to hold that judgement. As hard as that is. 

If you or your team have got something you’re still thinking about, wondering how it will go ...put it out there and test it. 

Get some valuable insights and feedback - then you can be more objective about your ideas. 

Running the perfect experiment

Have you got an idea to launch or run something? A concept or possibility that’s not yet real or tangible? 

Let’s take the idea and run an experiment. You know, test some of it out. 

Simple right? Aaah no, not so simple. 

Experiments may be all cool and startup-ish but we can so fear messing up or looking bad that we don’t even attempt an experiment at all!

For all the ‘fail fast’ messages blaring at us, we can find the action of testing something still too big a step to take. 

Are we expecting the perfect experiment? 

Do we keep working tweaking reading learning and writing until we become closer to 100% sure it will work? 

Where is the experiment part then?

Experiments are wonderful for discovery, to find out. If we don’t experiment we won’t find out. No matter how much thinking we put into it. 

It’s the ideal time to try some new and different things ... to discover what happens. 

If not now, when? 

There’s a hypothesis, hunch or idea on your list there. How about donning the lab coat, firing up the Bunsen burner and getting some feedback and insights from a petite experiment? 

I will if you will. 

Ready? 

How are the experiments going?

The changes we are making are just that - experiments. We are all trying some new things out and we will progressively see how it’s going. 

We’ll get some hindsight and be able to look back and review, reflect and see what we can make of it. 

Then we can make some adjustments and try something else ... another experiment. 

Adopting an experimental mindset of ‘I wonder...’, as in:
- ‘I wonder what this will be like’ 
- ‘I wonder how this will go’ 
- 'I wonder if this will work'
can keep us from expecting perfection and helps keep us adaptable. 

Wonder might be tricky when we are uncertain, worried or fearful. But the curiosity switch in us humans is strong. 

Keep a look out for an opportunity to wonder, experiment, observe, learn and continue to grow in these times. 

Try something else - EXPERIMENTS

Experimenting helps us refine, edit and alter our offers, services, designs and ideas. It's rare for a product or service we use to not be shaped by experiments. It's about seeing what works as well as what goes wrong.

Working with a global manufacturer over a number of years, I would often walk past a room labeled ‘Test Kitchen’. It was where clients, customers and users of their products were brought in and let loose!

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is big on experimenting. He said, ‘If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.’

So get your ideas out there so people can have a taste of some of it sooner, rather than waiting and giving them the whole finished thing later ... which they may not like the taste of. Imagine all that time working on something that wasn't to their taste. Put something out there, reflect on it, adjust it, put out another version of it, testing that… and onward.

Q: Are you much of an experimenter? Let me know in the comments below.

The waste of misdirected effort

Imagine working on a task or project and later finding that much of what you’ve done isn’t needed, that you'd kept heading down a path that wasn't necessary.

I noticed a colleague working on a project recently, spending hours and days preparing and producing some work and ... it’s not needed. It was never needed. They estimated they'd spent a week of time, at a minimum - all of it not needed.

Time could have been better directed towards more valuable activities.

We make many decisions every day about what we’re doing; I doubt we’re truly thinking about what’s the best use of our time. We get caught up in activities and tasks that we spend way too much time on - disproportionate to their value or their return to us or others.

The 'sunk cost fallacy' drags us in and we don’t want to turn around and head back out because we wrongly believe we need to stay the course and keep on down this path. But we don’t have to.

It’s never too late to call time on something that’s not right or not valuable or not worth it. No matter how far you’re along the 'wrong' path.

Be willing to call ‘stop’ or ‘time’ or say ‘hang on a moment; can we pause here?’ and then shift to the more valuable path.