Learning #6 - From Predictable Experiments to Finding the Unobvious: A Journey in Complexity

Learning of the day:   

In the last weeks, I started evaluating my experiments; the problem was that for some reason we always came up with the same idea, the same problems and obviously the same solutions.

Finally after reading about complexity (work from Dave Snowden) I realized that my missing concept was "detecting weak signals" or how I like to call it "things that are not obvious" before starting any experiment. Let me explain.

Usually my experiments would include discovery sessions and workshops with many people to try to detect opportunities and experiments but the results were always the same old, same old. During these workshops we usually ask the same questions: What went wrong, what can we improve, etc. People will then write the first ideas that come to their mind, we might cluster topics and vote. All of this gave usually the same topics and same solutions. 

What I was missing was the knowledge that when something is in the complex domain there is no obvious nor simple explanations or solutions.  Spending time with obvious or simple ideas is kind of wasting your time.  The problem is that we are sometimes scared of exploring unconventional ideas and in big groups we might go with what the majority considers a smart and logical solution. 

What we need is to find ideas that might be controversial, contradictive or in other words ambiguous. And then we can create experiments to see if those ideas actually are worth exploring.  How can we do that? Well, luckily for us there is already an area that has been working on this called: User Research.  This area has already a lot of ideas to find what a customer wants: Customer User Journey, Empathy maps, etc. They already know not to listen exactly what the customer says but follow them and identify things that are not obvious for then creating an MVP to validate the assumption.  Basically you can apply this in other fields.

This was a big learning for me and I hope if someone is in the same situation this post can help you.

Thx for reading.


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