Experimentation Begets Ideation

Jerry Seinfeld's fascinating conversation with Tim Ferriss sent me down a rabbit trail of fresh research and exploration. Of course comedians deal in ideas. Of course! But to think about their process as an "idea generating process" that I might glean insights from had just not occurred to me as clearly until now.

Part of the trail led me to dig into Steve Martin's memoir, "Born Standing Up." One of the passages that struck me early on speaks to a mistaken belief some folks have about creativity, namely, that you need a good idea before you get started.

Steve said, "That week at the Coffee and Confusion, something started to make sense. My act, having begun three years earlier as a conventional attempt to enter regular show business, was becoming a parody of comedy. I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer, a not so good one, and this embryonic notion drove me to work on other material in that vein."

To me, this story gets at the heart of wrong thinking about innovation. We don't always start with the good idea. Ideas develop over time, and one of the best ways to accelerate the development of ideas is to get in the game! Experimentation begets ideation.

As an example, just this morning I was talking with a couple of spectacular female founders who launched a business out of LaunchPad a few years back. They're fantastic. They had a fantastic idea at the time, and that idea has morphed over the last couple of years, especially in the midst of the pandemic. In classic start-up parlance, they had to "pivot." But here's the thing: you can't pivot if you're not moving forward!

And to think of ideation as somehow separate from experimentation is to think far too rigidly. The most generative and successful folks I know are constantly doing both; ideation feeds experimentation, and experimentation feeds ideation. They're constantly winnowing, based on what's working.

So what's the point? Don't wait to get started. Try something, and iterate your way forward.

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