Innovation 2.0: Experimenting to Improve, Not to Prove

to go in very different directions.

The purpose of experimentation should always be twofold: to test an assumption and to learn from the testing in order to improve on the idea.

in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town,” he said. Kamen envisioned urban centres freed of cars to make room for millions of Segway-powered pedestrians.

The Segway’s self-balancing system was indeed a technological marvel, and Kamen — with several breakthrough inventions under his belt — had no trouble attracting funding. Unfortunately, the entire project was so shrouded in secrecy that the Segway went through three or four iterations based exclusively on internal feedback, rather than user feedback. Concerned that someone would steal his idea, Kamen didn’t seek out enough critical customers.

As indicated, once you start testing your cherished idea, the chief risk is that well-established confirmation biases and sunk-cost effects will deaden your responsiveness to corrective feedback. Like Kamen, you may set up experiments to ratify your assumptions rather than refute them. You may engage in false experiments with unreliable feedback providers — family, friends, or like-minded thinkers — rather than real users. And the more you invest, the harder it may be to abandon the project or refocus your efforts.

Investigation is a more open-ended form of experimentation. It is designed to illuminate overlooked factors or preferences, leaving room for unexpected insights to emerge. Experimenting should never lock you into a cycle. It should provide you with opportunities to go in very different directions. You have to test your offerings earlier, on a smaller scale, and in more hostile environments. And when you receive criticism, you have to take it on board. Even when you are in validation mode, you must preserve space for discovery. Remember, you are testing to improve, not just to prove.

Following are some key principles to embrace.

To preserve your capacity to investigate WELCOME SURPRISES.

(make new discoveries and capture opportunities), even as you try to validate assumptions, you must welcome and accept surprises.

By preserving an exploratory mindset, you can acquire faster, richer, and more unexpected data from the outside world. A prime example of such thinking is architect Frank Gehry, whose pioneering designs are the result of a very unorthodox approach to experimentation.

Gehry’s fame stems from the instantly recognizable aesthetic of his buildings. His architectural sensibility was immortalized in an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge writes a letter asking him to build an opera house for her hometown of Springfield. Gehry balls up the letter and tosses it to the ground. But after looking at the crumpled letter, he’s suddenly inspired to build a similar-looking concert hall for Springfield.

Every Gehry building starts with a distinctive sketch. As captured in Sydney Pollack’s classic documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, his style is fluid but messy. His initial sketches are unconstrained by architectural norms: They are loose, squiggly, and impressionistic rather than precise — a far cry from the clean lines of conventional architectural renderings. Gehry’s sketches pay no heed to practicalities or even gravity, but this impulsive quality prevents him from becoming formulaic or repetitive in his designs. Although the drawings provide only loose directions, in retrospect, you can see that they contain the dynamic energy of the final design. They are intended to convey a feeling that will excite — or sometimes disturb — the client.

The journey from rough sketch to finished building is a long one, and though Gehry quickly translates the sketches into three-dimensional models, there is a prolonged back-and-forth between models and drawings. In other words, the experimentation process remains in a ‘liquid state’ for a long time. One reason for this is that Gehry resists the temptation to settle on the ‘right’ model, preferring instead to create a variety of study models— what he dubs ‘shrek’ (a Yiddish word for ‘fright’) prototypes.

Gehry wants the shrek models to make clients nervous. His aim is to provoke a strong reaction, whether positive or negative, so he can better understand how the client thinks. Based on the client input, he makes refinements and creates new models. These successive models don’t build on the ones that came

before. Instead, they represent divergent solutions. This process enables Gehry to continue exploring and learning from the clients’ discomfort. In this way, his ideas gradually ferment and mature over time.

Though he favours unorthodox forms, Gehry is very mindful of function. When the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, it was widely praised for its acoustics. Esa-pekka Salonen, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who worked closely with Gehry on the design, commented: “Frank was very clear from the beginning. He said, ‘This is a hall for the orchestra, and this is a building for music. And that has to be the first priority, and everything else is of lesser importance.’ And I thought this was quite a statement from an architect.”

Because his designs are unconventional, Gehry is sometimes misrepresented as someone who imposes designs on clients — take it or leave it. “That’s absolutely the opposite of who he is,” said Vanity Fair’s architecture critic, Paul Goldberger. “He goes through multiple iterations of every project and it’s not only his thinking but he’s very, very eager for feedback from clients and for dialog with them.”

Gehry proposes a multitude of designs. PROPOSE MULTIPLE MODELS.

As an experimenter, this gives him two advantages. First, it keeps him from getting too attached to any one idea. You can more easily remain open to learning — and pivoting — if you are not overinvested in your prototype. The longer you pursue an idea, the more you feel as though your reputation is tied to it.

As Gehry’s colleague, Jim Glymph, put it: “If you freeze an idea too quickly, you fall in love with it. If you refine it too quickly, you become attached to it. And it becomes very hard to keep exploring, to keep looking for better. So, the crudeness of the early models, in particular, is very deliberate. It keeps you from bonding with the idea so much that you can’t move on.”

Second, it speeds discovery and lets you pivot earlier, before hitting a wall. The lean start-up approach is very much sequential. You set off in one direction, go through iterative cycles of buildmeasure-learn, pivot when an assumption is clearly refuted, and progressively home in on a product-market fit. A more radical approach is to create multiple concepts and pursue the option that seems to have the most traction with future users, as shown by page views, sign-ups, or presales.

The primary aim is to get feedback and a first impression of whether the proposal resonates with independent experts or actual paying customers. Market testing in parallel is all the easier in the digital realm, where it’s fast and cheap to realistically simulate nonexistent products or services through landing pages. This way, no opportunity is lost or inadvertently dismissed.

Gehry doesn’t just propose several PROVOKE STRONG REACTIONS. sketches or models. He develops extreme points of view that provoke strong emotional reactions. Why? Because he values negative feedback as much as positive. He uses the shrek models to test people at the boundaries, making them ill at ease so they will react.

One professor involved in the committee overseeing the construction of the Peter B. Lewis building at Case Western University recalled the experience of working with Frank Gehry: “He often would say about a model he was presenting to the university team: This is not what we are doing. And it was difficult to appreciate what he meant until we followed the design as it evolved through dozens of iterations.”

The crude sketch of the early model was just a means of getting a reaction, exploring possibilities and investigating issues relevant to the building project. Though his fluid sketches are short on detail, they capture the energy and spirit of the proposed vision. And because his alternative models don’t build on each other, as if they were presented in sequence, Gehry is able to constantly surprise clients and maintain their discomfort to encourage a steady stream of feedback throughout the design process. Gehry is not interested in knowing what the building will look like at the very start. He’s willing to engage in open and vibrant discussions with clients so that together they can find out.

Beyond asking the right questions, Gehry shows a willingness to heed the answers and integrate them into his thinking.