Close the Loop on Experiments

Experimentation is a liberating concept, especially in the polished world of large organizations. As one leader told me, “It gives my team permission to try something new. When you say ‘experiment,’ you know it doesn’t have to succeed and it doesn’t have to be perfect. You know you’re doing it to learn something you don’t already know.” The concept of experimentation-driven-learning lowers the perceived risk of taking action, and also lowers the level of commitment required to act, because it’s a declaration of figuring out. That relieves a great deal of the pressure in the midst of expectations of perfection.

There is a downside to such freedom, though: folks can easily forget they were doing-in-order-to-learn. Unless the thread is carefully kept by an actual member of the team, the team will almost certainly fail to benefit.

Perhaps a personal example will illustrate: my wife and I were chatting about a challenge she was facing in the homeschool schedule she had designed — her energy just wasn’t where she wanted it to be at a certain point in the day. As we were talking, she remembered that she had changed the schedule a couple of weeks ago to see if she could increase engagement, but then had completely forgotten about making the change in order to learn. Remembering that she had been experimenting brought a sense of relief and also purpose to the conversation, as she was able to incorporate her fresh perspective into an iteration that she was now mindfully making.

It’s so easy to say we’re going to experiment in order to relieve the pressure and get the ball rolling on action, but all too often, we never close the loop. The irony is, without closing the loop on an experiment, we fail to harvest the very information we intended to create and collect in undertaking the approach!

So here’s a simple but powerful recommendation: whenever your team decides it’s going to experiment, make sure to block a time to gather data in advance of the next meeting, and carve out a little time in that meeting specifically to review the discoveries of the experiment. Without new information, there’s no new conversation. Determine in advance what kind of information you’d like to be able to discuss in the next meeting, and work backwards from there to determine what you need to do, and what data you need to collect in advance, to ensure a rich conversation.

If I may say so, here’s an excellent piece on how reflecting on experiments drove Steve Martin’s development as a comedian.

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