Experimentation

So many challenges that teams take on today are new, so a crucial part of our agile approach is learning. Getting good at that will accelerate your team and give you better outcomes.

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[00:00:00] Pia: So many challenges that teams take on today are new, so a crucial part of our agile approach is learning. Getting good at that will accelerate your team and give you better outcomes. I'm Pia.

[00:00:13] Dan: And I'm Dan, and this is Squadify Connects. Often we find ourselves under pressure to know what to do, or we spend a great deal of time and effort discussing and analyzing the situation to be sure that what we do is the right thing. And these can all be valuable activities, you know, but we can become paralyzed because in reality we're dealing with complex situations where there are conflicting factors at play, and crucially, where we don't really know what the reaction to our actions will be.

[00:00:42] Pia: Oh yes. Analysis paralysis. So rather than getting stuck, effective teams put experiments into play. This will mean getting clear about what you want to specifically learn, and they'll require your skills of asking a really good question. Then try something that will. Provide those learnings and then reviewing them at the end, either before persevering, either keep going in the same direction, or what we call pivoting, changing direction, and experimenting again.

[00:01:14] Dan: This can all sound a bit theoretical, but examples of experiments could be trying out some new product positioning or messaging on some customers and checking their reaction before building a website, for example, all the way through to using clever rapid prototyping techniques to build a new product, to show to your audience and see what their reaction is.

[00:01:34] Pia: It's so important because sometimes we want to build the thing to perfection, but the key here is that as far as possible, it's to get feedback quickly from the real world rather than overthinking things or slowing things down, or spending a load of money on something that may not work. So here's the interesting thing.

[00:01:53] Once you've built this experimentation muscle, you realize that almost everything is an experiment. Your team learns to take small actions and learn from them before repeating the cycle, and then moving quickly and learning quickly. In a way, experimentation is the essence of agile.

[00:02:11] Dan: Yes, indeed. And one final thought is on the human side. You know, when we take our ideas and spend a lot of time honing them and referring, refining them, as you were just saying, Pierre, we tend to get a little bit attached to them. So it can be hard for us to change cause, and we can start to take things personally. Experimentation know, sometimes it does happen. Um, experimentation allows you to learn, um, before that happens and nobody's offended to discover that their baby is ugly.

[00:02:39] Pia: Oh yes. So this week as an action, look for something that you've been stuck on or perhaps something that you plan to do and turn it into an experiment. Get clear on what you want to learn, and take some small actions and then reflect on the learnings. So enjoy your week experimenting. Next week we'll wrap up this miniseries on Agile, and we'll look at how to keep the team in shape to make the most of the Agile approach.