How to Embrace Experimentation in Problem Solving

Most companies claim they embrace failure. But walk into their Monday meetings, and watch people scramble to hide their missteps. I've seen it countless times. The same leaders who preach 'fail fast' are the first to demand explanations for every setback. Here's the uncomfortable truth:  Innovation dies in environments where people feel safer playing it safe. But there's a difference between reckless failure and strategic experimentation. Let me show you exactly how to build a culture that genuinely embraces productive failure: 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 Stop asking "Who's fault was this?" and start asking: "𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘺𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨?" "𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘶𝘴?" "𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯?" 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞 '𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬' Monthly meetings where teams present their failed experiments and the insights gained. The key? Leaders must go first. Share your own failures openly, specifically, and without sugar-coating. 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 "24-𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞" After any setback, give teams 24 hours to vent/process. Then require them to present three specific learnings and two potential next steps. This transforms failure from a dead end into a data point. Most "innovative" teams are just risk-averse businesses in disguise. They've mastered innovation theater, not actual innovation. Don't let your people think they need permission to innovate. Instead, start building systems and a culture that make innovation inevitable.

While many may run after perfection, I have a slightly different approach. Long term success is all about being comfortable with failure. I have invested a lot of time and effort into building a culture of experimentation at MathCo, which means we fail fast and learn fast. These learnings come from some of the most successful enterprises I've worked with, and I would like to give you a peek into this approach:    1. Start with clear business hypotheses    2. Design minimally viable experiments    3. Measure concrete outcomes    4. Extract actionable learnings    5. Scale what works, abandon what doesn't I still remember a retail client who initially wanted to invest millions in a comprehensive customer analytics platform. Instead, we guided them through three focused experiments targeting specific customer segments. Two failed — but the third generated $4M in incremental revenue within 90 days and revealed insights that completely reshaped their long-term analytics strategy. I'm constantly inspired by organizations that don't punish analytical failures but celebrate them as valuable learning. Short-term experimentation actually accelerates long-term strategy by revealing which paths not to take! TL;DR: Failing is the first step to success. I'm curious — has a "failure" ever led to an unexpected outcome for you? #Experimentation #Curiosity

If your first reaction to the word “improv” is to run for the hills—you’re not alone. My team of engineers was skeptical the first time I brought improv exercises to our weekly meetings. But then the fun started, and from there the energy was contagious. Now we use improv exercises weekly to fuel innovative problem-solving and fresh thinking. 👉 Here’s why it works: - We create a safe environment for half-baked ideas. No perfectionism here! - Exercises are framed as “experiments” designed to explore new ideas without a right or wrong answer. - The team has learned to be uncomfortable with discomfort. 👉 Here’s what it looks like in practice: - I invite the team to imagine they’re in a “magical room” with leaders who can provide the resources they need to make ideas happen. That way no one’s thinking is limited. - I invite the team to ground problems in human experiences, allowing others to empathize and ideate more freely. - We never leave an improv session without concrete next steps that lead to real-world execution. Big thanks to Janine MacLachlan for spotlighting this work for Forbes. I’d love to hear from others who’ve tried similar exercises for tech teams: what’s worked well? https://lnkd.in/exNk3R_9 #Leadership #TeamWork

I've walked through $50M innovation labs where the most innovative thing was the coffee machine. Glass walls. Foosball tables. Whiteboards covered in Post-its from brainstorming sessions that happened six months ago. Meanwhile, the actual breakthrough happens when Sarah from accounting hacks together a solution using Excel macros and pure spite. Most "innovation initiatives" are corporate theater. They exist to make executives feel innovative without actually changing anything. This happens everywhere. Every industry. Every size organization. The companies that move fast don't innovate despite their processes; they innovate by deliberately breaking them. Real experimental culture is messier. It's permission to break things on Tuesday and ship the fix on Wednesday. It's celebrating the person who says, "what if we tried the opposite?" It's about treating failure like data, not career poison. Netflix didn't innovate by building a streaming lab. They risked their entire DVD empire on a hunch. Spotify didn't committee their way to music streaming. They bet everything on an "illegal" idea that the music industry hated. The biggest takeaway? Stop building permission structures for innovation. Start removing the barriers that prevent it. Your best people aren't waiting for innovation workshops. They're already experimenting in the shadows, hoping someone notices before they get told to "follow the process." The truth: While you're designing innovation processes, your competitors are shipping experiments. What's the weirdest successful "experiment" you've seen someone pull off when nobody was watching?

While I was a consultant, I saw *some* in-house experimentation leaders regularly get promotions and build career capital, while others remained stuck. What made the high performers stand out? Here are 3️⃣ insights from watching those ambitious leaders build strong careers 📈 1️⃣ Tie yourself to the metrics that matter Every successful leader I worked with knew exactly which numbers their CEO obsessed over and made it the center of their experimentation program. (hint: it was never a conversion rate) By consistently reporting results in terms of impact to *the* key business metric, they built a strong association between their remit and the most important business outcomes. They built "mental availability" in the C-suite's minds. For a gym chain, this was "Joins" (new membership enrollments). For a leadgen business connecting people with healthcare providers, it was "Referred Leads" (leads that had passed qualification from their sales field and were referred to providers). In every case, it required building measurement infrastructure beyond the website and clickstream data. But once that trust was established, I saw CEOs join every quarterly review of experiment results and actively engage. That's a rare opportunity for most job functions - don't squander the incredible seat you're in! 2️⃣ Center experimentation in big, messy, strategic projects Website redesigns, revamped pricing and packaging, new product launches - every business has major initiatives like this, but it can be technically, culturally, even statistically hard to utilize experimentation for them. The most successful leaders I saw didn't let a good challenge scare them off. Even when they had to expend career capital and put their reputation at risk, they got their elbows out to plant experimentation right in the middle of the innovation mess. It often required building alliances across functions, strong managing up, and lots of communication. I guess this is obvious - those are the skills that set high performers apart in *any* function. By making sure experimentation contributed to the success of the biggest, most visible initiatives, these leaders continued to build perception of experimentation's importance while leveraging a natural opportunity to evangelize experimentation further into the org. 3️⃣ Run quarterly experimentation reviews Gather your most interesting experiments every quarter - positive, negative, or flat - and put some effort into a visually interesting presentation to show them off and spark discussion around the insights derived from each. Then gather as large of an audience as you can. Some of the Eppo team just got back from a trip visiting customers in Europe where a few ran "experimentation days" like this. The feedback from one CEO? "I'll be logging in to Eppo every day to keep more up-to-date on the experiments we're running." That kind of visibility is impossible to put a price tag on. #experimentation

Leading with humility, not just authority -- In a world of constant disruption, what’s the biggest risk a leader can take?  It is believing they have all the answers. I was reminded of this by Tim Harford’s classic TED talk on trial, error, and the "God Complex."  For those of us driving strategy in complex organizations, his message is more relevant than ever. It's not about having the perfect plan; it's about building a system that finds the best plan. My key takeaways for any leader today: - Challenge the "God Complex": True leadership isn't about being infallible. It's about fostering a culture of psychological safety where your best people are empowered to challenge assumptions and point out the blind spots you inevitably have. - Embrace Rapid Iteration: Harford’s Unilever example—developing a nozzle through 45 prototypes—is brilliant. The goal isn't a perfect first draft; it's a rapid learning cycle. Value progress over perfection. - Treat Failure as Data: Every "mistake" is simply a data point telling you what doesn't work. When we build systems that measure outcomes and learn from them without blame, we aren't failing—we're getting smarter, faster. - Build an Evolutionary Engine: Your strategy should be designed to evolve. Instead of placing one huge bet, place many small, intelligent ones. Let real-world results—not just boardroom theory—pick the winners. Leadership isn't about having the map; it's about building a better compass. How do you build experimentation into your team's DNA? #Leadership #Experimentation #AdaptiveStrategy #LearningCulture #Innovation #RRD #BusinessResilience #ContinuousImprovement

What would you do if you knew it was safe to fail? In life? In leadership? Just imagine a world where a stumble is seen as a leap forward. It's possible! As leaders, we can create this environment by celebrating failure as a key ingredient in the recipe for innovation. This is what the “get out of jail free” cards I distributed to Best Buy’s senior leaders were about: encourage experimentation. A key is to protect the downside and to take calculated, reversible gambles. This was the approach our strategic growth office adopted with initiatives like the in-house advisors: come up with new ideas, design pilots, test them, then either shelve them or roll them out more widely. In fact, the first pilot for in-home advisors failed, and we had to go back to the drawing board and try again. Likewise, when we decided to match online prices early in our turnaround, it was initially an experiment we could have reversed, had it not paid off. Many pilots did not succeed, and we ended up shelving multiple ideas. Without these failed experiments, we would not have developed the successful ones. What "bad" idea have you had at work? What AMAZING idea did it lead to? Read Amy Edmondson's excellent book The Right Kind of Wrong to learn more about this - https://amzn.to/44GoMcV #UnleashingHumanMagic