“Congrats on the failure.” Why testing your ideas cannot NOT work
Whenever someone walks into a company - whether you work there, or a consultant has come in, or it’s your boss - and suggests a totally different approach to innovation, resistance is pretty inevitable. Change is hard in any circumstance, but when it involves a new, weird-sounding methodology no-one’s heard of (“Pretotyping? What’s that? Don’t you mean prototyping?”) people get especially twitchy.
Pretotyping and rapid experimentation is not just a method, but a mindset shift. It requires you not only to get comfortable with failure, but to celebrate it. In a society (or a workplace) that often demonises and shames us for failing, this can be a tough barrier to overcome both personally and within your team.
“Successful implementation [of pretotyping] depends on changing the way teams approach innovation, focussing on failing fast, early, and at low cost in order to avoid building products that might result in expensive, high-profile failures,” says Richard Guy, who heads the innovation team at AGL and uses rapid experimentation as a core part of his process. Guy has overcome this challenge by using the high energy and story-telling abilities of his team to turn failure into learning experiences, reporting back data from their experiments in engaging ways that stimulate others’ curiosity.
In Exponentially’s free Pretotyping Slack channel, John Blicq - who headed the innovation team for a large insurance company - has discussed how he helped overcome pretotyping pushback from outside his innovation team by helping people to understand that “innovators are not crazy risk takers but rather strategic system thinkers trying to apply a scientific approach to capturing and testing options for business model renewal.”
Pretotyping essentially follows the scientific method: you create a hypothesis, run an experiment, gather data, then design another experiment to test a new hypothesis. With each iteration, you get smarter - you learn more about your customers, by measuring what they do rather than what they say, and you are able to build products and services that you know they want, because the data says so. It’s a rigorous process that delivers reliable data and allows innovation teams (and the wider organisations) to make well-informed decisions. When people understand that, a lot of the fear, trepidation and confusion around the process fades away, and you’re in for a smoother ride.
“If pretotyping is taught well and practiced well this is exactly the outcome I have come to expect,” says Alberto Savoia, founder of pretotyping and Google’s Innovation Agitator Emeritus. “It takes both a great teacher, like Leslie and his team, and great students with an open mind and enough courage to tell the haters / blockers / passive aggressors: ‘Give us a chance to show you how this works.’ As I like to say, if practiced correctly pretotyping cannot not work.”
Our challenge to you is this: just try testing one idea. Instead of ploughing ahead with product development based on the opinions of those in your team, slow down. Design an experiment. Pretotype it. You may be surprised by what you