Trial and Error

Excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator

CHAD: I know you’ve listened to the podcast; you know I love innovation quotes, so I asked you to bring one too. What’s the quote you have for us?

JOHN: So I had to bring a different one this time, and I thought the one that fit what we were talking about the best was one that I think is attributable to Peter Skillman at IDEO. But I could be wrong. But we’ll call it Peter’s until someone corrects us. It is,

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

I think it applies to what we’ve been talking about for two reasons: the myth of the lone genius in organization and design and the importance of context.

Myth of the Lone Genius

First, there is the notion that the lone genius is the innovator. Some lone geniuses are indeed innovative. But the innovation we’re talking about in organization design is usually not possible for a single individual. It’s a collaborative approach and requires diverse input for several reasons. Organization Design and the whole notion of architecture bring together art and science from so many disciplines that you have to have those people in a collaborative effort. So it’s not about being a lone genius. No individual knows enough to do great organizational design, or at least I haven’t met anybody.

Iterative Series of Experiments

Another issue is you actually can’t do good organizational design in the boardroom. You can do a good hypothesis and initial design in a boardroom or a room somewhere, but until you implement it in the organization and prototype it and implement it and test it out, you don’t really know how it’s going to work because the “thought experiments” that we do in a room are useful, but they’re often wrong. Some of the biggest mistakes, and maybe this has happened to you; it’s happened to me, where, in one part of the organization, they invented a new way of doing something, and it worked so well there, everybody had to do it.

Importance of Context

So we were all forced to do it that way. They forgot a key context issue: that process didn’t work the same way across divisions or functions. For all of us to do it that way would have required modifications to make it work. Unfortunately, management’s answer is usually that people need to change, not the process, and suck it up and make it work because it does work. We know it works; it works over here. So that’s the whole enlightened trial and error: being flexible and testing it. Every time you change the context, you test it and allow for feedback, variation, and improvement when necessary to make it work.

Good organization design is not about creating a brilliant design in a room, although that’s part of the process. The real work of design comes in testing it, trial and error, redesigning, and retesting. And that’s a collaborative approach, so this quote just kind of sums it up for me. 

The video is an excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator. For more podcasts on innovation and product development, check out the podcast on his website and iTunes.