“An A/B test needs a ‘B.’”

I’m proud of that line from my guest post on Kim Scott’s “Radical Candor” blog. It distills an incredibly important realization: the very act of comparative testing requires generating alternatives.

Far too often, a team only has one idea. But the masters of creativity have always known: best to request options.

David Kelley told me that legendary Stanford professor Bob McKim, who founded Stanford's human-centered Product Design Program in 1958, would answer inquiring students in the same way: “Show me three.”

If you wanted to know what McKim thought about a particular project direction, you had to give him options.

This is a fantastic way to force fresh thinking on a team.

More recently, Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots of Google’s famed “X,” has done something similar: “I always ask teams to bring me five ideas,” he told me recently. “Sure, now that folks know that, teams try to game the system by bringing one idea they like and four ‘dummy’ ideas. What’s funny is, often one of the dummy ideas is every bit as good as the one they really like!”

Implicit in any new direction is the possibility (likelihood!) of failure. A great innovation leader, when presented with a nascent direction, will ask, “What else are we trying?” This is NOT to increase the workload on the team, but rather to acknowledge the underlying realities facing innovation endeavors, and to emphasize the importance of learning-by-comparison.

Related: Consider the Odds
Related: The Problem With Solving Problems
Related: Create A Portfolio

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