The Age of Experimentation

I don’t think Experimentation has ever really gone away. However, it seems there has been a resurgence in willingness to experiment.

Scott Berkun mentioned something about very interesting about Experiments during his interview where he discussed his newly launched book “The Year without Pants” on Michele Price’s BlogTalkRadio show.

Key Point – You Don’t Know

He mentioned that when Experiments are conducted you don’t always know the outcome. And that’s the beauty of it. That’s WHY you run them. If you already knew the outcome why bother running the experiment.

Sure. You might have an assumption, but until you run the experiment you don’t know the result. He was emphatic that more experimentation in business needs to occur. The reasoning was that by running experiments the business can grow and most important people can grow. The people that propose, design, run and interpret the experiment can be tested.

In effect, this experimentation is a test of the people
as much as it is of the experiment itself.

It is important that people can put their assumptions to the test.

Let them. Encourage them. Reward them.

What Was The Take Away?

The second part of his point on Experiments was …

Did You Learn Anything?

This was salient point #2. If no one learned anything then the experiment was a failure. Even if the learning was … “WOW, that was a waste of time!” the fact that an experiment was designed and run with some sort of an outcome is still important.

Progress does not always come from these experiments.

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
~ Thomas A. Edison

What’s Next?

If you haven’t read Scott’s new book … which is OK … because it just came out. You can get your copy here (affiliate link*)

Then … get out and do some Experimenting.

For more information about Scott or Michele
click on the links below:

Scott Berkun	Michele Price

*Disclosure: Affiliate links. I link these books under my Amazon Affiliate ID. If you have a big issue with this you can opt-out. I’m no Chris Brogan, but Chris wrote a short and sweet blog post about why this should not be a despised act – as he says it’s beer money. For me – it might be one (small) cup of coffee. If you like the book recommendations … great. Buy ‘em via my affiliate link. I thank you and in return I’ll buy the coffee for YOU when we meet in person.

Jeff Shuey is a veteran in the Enterprise Content Management industry. Over the past 20 years he has worked with customers and partners to design, develop and deploy solutions around the world. Jeff is currently the Director of Strategic Alliances at Winshuttle. He has worked for Microsoft, FileNet, K2, Captaris, Open Text, Kofax and Kodak. He speaks and blogs about ECM and the Intersection between Social, Mobile and Cloud Computing.

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