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.

Like Surprises

I'm posting this week on Working in Uncertainty. Once you’ve started before you’re ready and in motion, exciting things will happen. There will be unexpected, unknown and uncertain. Yes more uncertain.

You may think starting wasn’t a good idea, but you're in motion and have momentum - that's going to make you more able to respond than being at a standstill.

Welcome spontaneity into your world instead of being all control-freak on things. Spontaneity is a natural tendency or impulse of being unconstrained and unplanned. Our daily actions can't follow a script. A guide or to-do list or a structure, yes, but we can't know totally what someone else is going to say, how they'll react and what will happen when all these differences collide.

We need the capability to improvise and the first thing is to welcome surprises, unexpected things. Stay open and wondering. You'll be easier to work with, more open about what to do next, and able to find other possibilities and solutions.

Q : So, are you a bit of a control freak or willing to welcome surprises? Let me know below. 

Working in uncertainty

A phrase often heard in the startup world and a mantra of entrepreneurs striving to make forward progress is 'start before you’re ready'. It’s a motto that can apply to many of us.

OK not surgeons or pilots!

Yet we can spend (waste?) a lot of time waiting for the ‘right’ time, or waiting until we ‘feel right’ or for the right path to appear.

If we keep waiting for the most perfect and ideal conditions or we do all that ‘busy work’ that isn’t about launching or shipping or changing something, then we will be waiting... forever.

Things may not ever be 100% finished or ready; we'll have to start, launch, print, send, go before we feel ready ... or are ready.

Most things aren't certain when you're working in uncertainty.

 Q: Why do you think we can be fearful to start before we're ready? Leave a comment below sharing your thoughts.

When is enough ... enough

This week I've posted on 4 things:

How much INFORMATION is enough

How much THINKING is enough

How much WORK is enough

How many REVISIONS are enough.

Enough. It means 'adequate, sufficient, ample'. Our research, thinking, working and revisions can be either a productivity winner ... or a productivity killer. When we spend more than enough time researching, more than enough time thinking, and then overworking and reworking, we need to pause, stop, and understand:

- what we are doing, and

- why we are doing it.

It's too easy to get swept up or drawn down into the activities of our daily work and life ... and it's a key reason why our productivity takes a hit. A huge part of self-leadership is knowing how much is enough. And then when it's enough, we need to press the button, go live, launch or release the thing.

Take care of yourself and others by not wasting unnecessary time, energy and worry on tasks and activities that aren't needed. Enough. It could be the most effective productivity tool you've got.

Q: What's good enough to go live on in your world right now?

How many revisions are enough?

Reworking, editing, checking, changing. How long do we spend working on the next version?

Documents, reports and presentations travel up and down a company's hierarchy to be changed, edited, revised, and approved. Changes are made but it’s still not sent out or shared. It’s time for another round of changes.

And another round.

Up and down it goes.

The heart of the message gets lost and in its place, a wordy banal message like every other. All in the pursuit of accuracy, control, correctness, getting it ‘right’, perhaps to counter the the fear of it being ‘wrong’ or imperfect.

But it can never be perfect because things change. And we are human.

The tinkering is a cover, it’s stalling and fear. Hours working and reworking, writing and editing, tinkering. And the waiting ... the waiting in between every revision.

It’s not productive.

Want a gain in productivity? Check how many versions that report or document has been through; how many hands have been on it, eyes that have seen it, how many times it's been checked, revised and re-checked. What’s really going on here? How many revisions will be enough before it goes live?