Experimentation is foundational to discovery. People who are ambitious, conscious, responsible and brave conduct experiments. An important orientation in experimentation: knowing (concretely) where you are in the current situation, and where you want to get, objectively.
You don’t walk into an experiment with an answer, but with a question that brings us to a place we’ve never been. What do ‘safe to fail’ experiments look like when the results affect customers? For this, that longer term, higher-order perspective that comes from principles and a clear objective to support our decision making. The learning we anticipate needs to be worth any disruption, and the feedback cycle needs to be short, specially in an Agile environment. Another way to conduct safe-to-fail experiments is by actually involving the customer, with transparency.
As we learned from TPS at Toyota, experiments tune the organizational tension between quality and delivery. Find the creativity in that tension to ask the needed questions, then advocate for sprints, or simply cycles of discovery & delivery with fixed-time, fixed-quality, flexible scope to allow for the inherent iteration from the experiment learnings.
We invite you in this global climate of exponential disruption to transition the way you lead away from the static, disconnected silos of traditional management. Dare to break the isolation of dogmatic methodologies.
Encourage and incentivize your teams to transition from blindly driving outputs to making conscious choices based on learning from data and experimentation, furthering initiatives in the direction of the needed outcomes. As you shift into working with OKRs, we offer a decade of lessons learned:
- – OKRs are not simply lists monitoring metrics, initiatives or tasks.
- – OKRs must help us track if we are gaining impactful learning about user and customer behaviors.
- – OKRs are not a fantasy. OKRs must focus, align and continuously synchronize.
- – OKRs are not achievable with business as usual.
- – OKRs combined with Health Metrics need to balance growth and speed with quality and cost.
- – Health metrics help teams keep end to end ownership of their mission.
- – Copy/Paste doesn’t work- you practice, you learn, situationally.