Experiment!

Want to jump start your professional and leadership development?  There’s something you can do that will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your change and learning efforts: make the shift from the pursuit of experience to a commitment to experiment.  For a discussion of experiment and what it means for those who would own their professional and leadership development, hit the jump. 

The root word for experience and experiment are the same.  We know that people learn from experience, but how many of us are learning from experiment?  What’s the difference?  The primary difference between the two is the care you take in observing.  To experiment is to do the following:  To act. To carefully and objectively observe the consequences of that action.  To form a model of cause and effect from your observations and to validate this understanding through further experiment.  Experiment, not experience, has been the driving force for our increase of understanding in every field of human knowledge.

To experiment means figuring out what you want to understand in terms of cause and effect – what you would identify as the driving feature of a system or a process.  For example, I want to improve my relationship with my co-workers.  I can learn from experience – from the ad hoc happenings of day-to-day interaction – or I can learn from experiment.  I can try, for example, and figure out what role trust plays in building relationships.  One way to do this would be to take one targeted relationship and choose to visibly trust that person.  I tell them I trust them.  I take action consistent with that trust (not checking up on them, giving them a broader scope of action, confiding in them, if that is appropriate).  I then carefully observe the consequences of my action.  Does trust work?  How does it work?  What was most effective and least effective as a technique to convey that trust and what would I change for next time, either with the same professional relationship or a different one.  This is experiment.

Experience is passive – its just what happens to you.  Experiment is active; you take ownership of experience and design it in a way that meets your specific needs.    Experiment is crucial because we are often surprised by what is key and what will be incidental for our professional success.  We have only a murky and half-formed sense of what will combine in unexpected ways to open the door to our success.