Issue No. 217 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a page-turner book on innovation and experimentation with dozens of “I didn’t know that” examples from Pixar, Frank Gehry, early-era HP, and many others. I read it on my new Amazon Kindle, but I think I prefer books you can touch, feel and loan out. And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Fail Quickly to Learn Fast
“The writers for the humor publication the Onion, known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week,” reports Peter Sims in his fascinating book, Little Bets. That’s just a three percent success rate for headline writers. Yikes. Or maybe not yikes.
Subtitled, “How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries,” we quickly learn—through dozens of mini-case studies—that innovation comes through hard work, experimentation and bosses who are cheerleaders for failure. (And I would also guess innovation happens with a healthy dose of weekly staff encouragement, motivation and hoopla-type fun. I mean, what if your best headline ideas were ranked 19th each week?)
Example: Comedian Chris Rock tests, tests and re-tests every joke—and every word—for up to six months (or even a year) at his local comedy club before he takes his hour-long act on the road or on national television.
Example: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has built an “experimental discovery mentality” so that “whether or not employees are doing so is a part of their performance reviews.”
The author adds, “Like Chris Rock, Bezos has accepted uncertainty; he knows that he cannot reliably predict which ideas for new markets will work and which won’t. He’s got to experiment. One such example is a feature the company launched that would compare a customer’s entire purchase history with its millions of other customers in order to find the one person with the closest matching history. In one click, Amazon would show you what items that customer purchased.
“‘No one used it,’ Bezos has said. ‘Our history is full of things like that, where we came up with an innovation that we thought was really cool, and the customers didn’t care.’”
It’s all about making a series of little bets—not one humongous bet—just little ones with the hope that just a couple will pay big dividends. “Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don’t analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do. They have all attained extraordinary success by making a series of little bets.”
The book surprised me. I expected cute little success stories like, “Well…I just flipped the spaghetti onto the wall—and it stuck!” Instead, the innovators of little experiments were actually productive creative teams of “rigorous, highly analytical, strategic and pragmatic” people. There are no step-by-step formulas.
Instead, there is a focus on five fundamentals: 1) Experiment (fail quickly to learn fast); 2) Play (a fun environment never snuffs out or prematurely judges the ideas—the case study on Pixar is amazing); 3) Immerse (get out with customers and learn from the ground up); 4) Reorient (make small wins and necessary pivots); and 5) Iterate (repeat, refine and test frequently).
Caution though: this approach is a 180 plunge from what the profs taught us. He quotes Sir Ken Robinson, “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Plus, most management approaches are all about reducing errors and risk—not giving license to having a good whack at a half-baked idea. Goodness, this is God’s money we’re wasting!
So…is this just one more niche business book—a good read, a few memorable stories—and then back to real-life-in-the-trenches? Hopefully, no. Leverage the insights of Little Bets in your planning process—with one mega-caveat. “The fact is that much of what we would like to be able to predict is unpredictable. Global market movements, political and cultural complexities, and demographic shifts constantly reshape the ground beneath us. This certainty of uncertainty is becoming ever more evident with the accelerating pace of technological change. The Internet has reduced communications barriers and allows new players from different corners of the world to rapidly emerge and compete globally. Thus a key flaw with the top-down, central planning approach is how limited it is in allowing us to be limber and able to discover new ways of doing things.”
Yikes…I’ve exceeded my prudent word limit—but I have another 100 paragraphs or whole pages of Little Bets highlighted you’ll have to discover for yourself. BTW, I read this on my new Amazon Kindle—and love the highlighting and note-making options. Perfect for airplanes; but not as easy to pass around the room during my workshops and board consultations! I’m still undecided about it.
To order the book or the Kindle edition from Amazon, click on the title for Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, by Peter Sims.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Sims quotes from the book, The Fog of War, saying former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (under Kennedy and Johnson) fell prey to the “illusion of rationality.” He says “it happens when ideas or assumptions seem logical in a plan, spreadsheet model, PowerPoint, or memo, yet they haven’t been validated on the ground or in the real world.” Do we have any recent examples of this in our shop?
2) How effective are we at “failing quickly” to learn fast?
Singing From the Same Songsheet - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Printing (Communications) Bucket, Chapter 19, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to choose a stylebook and stick with it.
I use the Associated Press Stylebook as my bible for abbreviations, capitalizations, style, dates (is it December 10 or Dec. 10?), etc. For example, the AP Stylebook says San Clemente, California (in a sentence) should be abbreviated as “San Clemente, Calif.” not “San Clemente, CA.” Every stylebook is different, but you must pick one. In your newsletters, websites and press releases, you’re striving for consistency—so every team member is singing from the same songsheet.
For more help visit the Printing Bucket webpage.
NEW! JUST ADDED:
June 15-16, 2011 (Wed. & Thurs.) - Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience, Seattle (hosted and sponsored by Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission)
June 18, 2011 (Sat.) – Nonprofit Board Governance Workshop, Orange County, Calif.
June 28-29, 2011 (Tues. & Wed.) – The Rolling 3-Year Strategic Plan Workshop, Orange County, Calif.
Sept. 17, 2011 (Saturday) – Nonprofit Board Governance Workshop, Orange County, Calif.
Sept. 27-28, 2011 (Tues. & Wed.) – Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience, Orange County, Calif.
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