Experimentation is all about adopting a learner mindset - whoever you are and whatever your position in an organisation. Immersing yourself in the world of your customer with the goal of finding out more about their needs is the key to successful innovation.
Experimentation is not an expensive undertaking - it can be done quickly and easily with little investment. It’s all about making your ideas real and testing them with real people; the people that you are designing for.
It’s also about building a culture of transparency - promoting the sharing of work in progress, and encouraging teams to act quickly and pivot their ideas based on new knowledge.
What is my role as a leader?
Identify and question yours and others’ assumptions
Promote and role model curiosity, hold things lightly and always aim to learn
Build a culture of sharing successes, failures and learnings
Invest in testing with customers
As a leader, you can promote experimentation by encouraging your teams to interact with customers as much as possible. You should constantly be asking “how can we learn more?”
You are also in a key position to role model progress over perfection - get your team into the habit of recognising “good enough” in their work, and moving on with pragmatism
