Experiments in life and at work are great ways to learn and discover insights you don’t have. However, for those insights to be meaningful, experiments require some rigor.
Whether big or small, what are you experimenting with at the moment? Perhaps it’s:
- Not drinking coffee after 2pm
- Running
- An email newsletter
- A new format for team meetings
- Virtual community building
- A 4-day work week
- Having all your team members participate in customer calls
- Or something else?
For whatever you are experimenting with, have you set a frame and defined measurable parameters?
- Why are you experimenting?
- What’s your hypothesis?
- What’s the process for the experiment?
- For how long are you running the experiment?
- What does success and failure look like?
- What are you measuring to evaluate how your experiment is going?
It’s unlikely that all your experiments need to adhere meticulously to the scientific method and require statistical significance. But, if you are looking to generate meaningful insights that help move you forward, your experiments do require a defined process for testing and analysis.
Otherwise you’re just dabbling, not experimenting.
