I’m a big fan of experimentation
, that is to test as many ideas possible faster than the next guy. Whenever I propose this to a client I get the “we don’t want to do tests, we want to get things done” “It’s time consuming” “we already know what they want/think” blabber. Bla!
Testing new ideas gives you valuable insight that you might not get by planning a picture perfect approach, often times the unexpected shows itself and that new insight becomes the key to your new idea. This is nothing new but today is as important as ever.
As the saying goes “testing is better than guessing”.
Embracing change isn’t easy, the problem is our society is ingrained with the mind set of always being right because being right makes you look smart and therefore everyone else will speak your gospel.
While always being right sounds great, you’re only right in the minds of people who have the same beliefs as you do and in a world that’s always changing what you thought today will be mostly irrelevant tomorrow.
The rise of social media has only helped to expose this phenomenon as we struggle to keep up with change as more interactions between people mean more change and therefore more unpredictability.
It’s important to understand that we need to learn as fast as the world is changing, we can’t stop learning. This is hard to do, but testing new ideas has never been easier and cheap.
And as the world embraces social media, tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed make it easy to experiment. Never in history has a single person had access to as much information and as many people than today in real-time.
If you’ve been thinking that experimentation is time consuming and unpredictable, you really have no choice anymore, technology has made testing ideas cheap and more importantly the feedback is faster.
Embrace it and make it your own.
Key takeaway: The price of failure is much lower now, so your willingness to try new things should be much higher. If you’re a small business this is even more important because someone else is testing new ideas faster than you are and you’re well on your way to irrelevancy.
Rapid innovation is here to stay, ignore it at your own peril!
What are you waiting for?