Be Scientific

Last night I was chatting with a few hundred Australian lawyers about Ideaflow. We discussed the symbiotic relationship between ideation and experimentation. One of the questions that came up was, “How clinical do you need to be in dismissing ideas?” I loved that question! I often find myself borrowing the language of the scientific method when dealing with potential founders:

Conduct experiments, test your hypothesis, define your outcome variable, etc

Such language acknowledges the inherent uncertainty in undertaking an entrepreneurial venture, and also the systematic methods which a founder can employ to reduce that uncertainty. Interestingly, the scientific method is very much related to another tenant of the designer’s approach to problem solving: The Beginner’s Mindset.

“It had already occurred to psychologists that children are innate scientists, probing, puttering, experimenting with the possible and impossible in a confused local universe. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange – these are the domain of all children and scientists.” (James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman)

This is an exceptional description of early stage entrepreneurship as well: “constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit.” In fact, it’s a skill that can be learned, and has been empirically demonstrated to result in better entrepreneurial outcomes:

A team of Italian researchers taught “startups to develop frameworks for predicting the performance of their idea and to conduct rigorous tests of their hypotheses very much like scientists do in their research. We let the firms in the control group, instead, follow their intuitions about how to assess their idea, which has typically produced fairly standard search heuristics. We find that entrepreneurs who behave like scientists perform better, pivot to a greater extent to a different idea, and do not drop out less than the control group in the early stages of the startup. These results are consistent with the main prediction of our theory: a scientific approach improves precision: it reduces the odds of pursuing projects with false positive returns, and raises the odds of pursuing projects with false negative returns.” (A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision-Making by Arnaldo Camuffo, Alessandro Cordova, Alfonso Gambardella)

Entrepreneurial endeavors are fraught with uncertainty and risk. Being rigorous about one’s approach — almost scientific, inherently childlike — is one way to maximize the likelihood of success. Running cheap experiments with clarity about the hypotheses you’re testing is the best way to resolve that uncertainty.

Related: Ideas and Experiments: The Dynamic Duo
Related: Make Experiments Cheaper
Related: Judge Experiments Before Ideas
Related: Experimental Hygiene
Related: Close the Loop on Experiments
Related: Improve Your eROI

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