As we've seen, collaborative problem solving does have risks — new ideas might be crushed prematurely, judges might be intimidated, and more. Risks continue when we move to experimentation or prototyping. Let's now examine how to avoid some of the troubles that can arise during experimentation.
- Design experiments to facilitate learning
- Most experimental efforts are designed merely to determine whether an idea "can work," but that isn't enough. We need to know not only whether the idea can work, but also what its weaknesses are, how severe they are, and how we can address them.
- Regard each experiment as an exploration of the solution and how it interacts with a hostile environment. Try to determine the consequences of its misbehavior, and the cost of eliminating that misbehavior.
- Capture learning from experiments
- Experiments — especially well-designed experiments — create knowledge. Since experiments cost time and resources, we must be prepared to capture all the knowledge they create. We sometimes adjust experiments on the fly in response to what we're learning. Although these adjustments can be helpful if the adjusted experiment is still well designed, that isn't always the case. Sometimes the result of adjusting experiments on the fly is a muddled mess from which we can learn little, if anything at all.
- When conducting experiments to test newborn ideas, provide a means of capturing and storing generated ideas in such a way that they don't interfere with the ongoing experiment. When the new learning does demand immediate adjustment of the current experiments, take care to adjust them in ways that can still produce useful experimental results. That care takes time and effort, which means schedule and budget.
- Protect experiments from transition to production
- One of the most common tales of tragedy is that of the prototype that got sold to a customer. The interference of production with experimentation creates two classes of problems. First, because the prototype was intended as an experiment, it often has attributes and structures that make it unreliable and expensive to maintain or enhance. Second, if the pattern of interference of production with experimentation has occurred before, the experimenters learned long ago that they must take steps to make the prototypes more durable than ordinary experiments would have to be.
- The resultOne of the most common
tales of tragedy is that of
the prototype that got
sold to a customer is that experimentation is more expensive than it needs to be, and maintaining or enhancing fielded products that are former prototypes is more expensive than it needs to be. In short, the result is neither a good prototype nor a good product. - When conducting experiments to test newborn ideas, conduct experiments. Insulate the experiments from any pressure to convert them into products. Your experiments will be cheaper, and when the time comes to actually build a product, it will be built right.
If one of these ideas for experiments is itself a new idea for your organization, try adopting it — but experiment first. First issue in this series Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Problem Solving and Creativity:
- Design Errors and Group Biases
- Design errors can cause unwanted outcomes, but they can also lead to welcome surprises. The causes of
many design errors are fundamental attributes of the way groups function. Here is Part II of our exploration.
- What Are the Chances?
- When estimating the probabilities of success of different strategies, we must often estimate the probability
of multiple events occurring. People make a common mistake when forming such estimates. They assume
that events are independent when they are not.
- Comply, Resist, or Exploit?
- When we encounter obstacles, we have choices about how we deal with them. Generally, we can comply,
we can resist, or sometimes, we can find ways to use the obstacles — to exploit them — to
advance to our objectives. The pandemic provides two examples.
- The McNamara Fallacy
- The McNamara Fallacy is the idea that measuring properly chosen attributes of inputs and outputs provides
all we need for decisions about organizational and human performance. And we can safely ignore anything
that can't be measured. It doesn't work.
- On Working Breaks in Meetings
- When we convene a meeting to work a problem, we sometimes find that progress is stalled. Taking a break
to allow a subgroup to work part of the problem can be key to finding simple, elegant solutions rapidly.
Choosing the subgroup is only the first step.
See also Problem Solving and Creativity and Problem Solving and Creativity for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming January 29: A Framework for Safe Storming
- The Storming stage of Tuckman's development sequence for small groups is when the group explores its frustrations and degrees of disagreement about both structure and task. Only by understanding these misalignments is reaching alignment possible. Here is a framework for this exploration. Available here and by RSS on January 29.
- And on February 5: On Shaking Things Up
- Newcomers to work groups have three tasks: to meet and get to know incumbent group members; to gain their trust; and to learn about the group's task and how to contribute to accomplishing it. General skills are necessary, but specifics are most important. Available here and by RSS on February 5.
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