Experiments: Your #1 Tool For Creative Thinking

Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

Experimenting is one of the most important actions you can take as a creative person. What I love most about running an experiment is that it implies that you don’t know what will happen. You might have a guess, but you aren’t sure.

Experiments require that we put down our ego. We say “I’m not sure what will happen, but I’m willing to find out.”

If you want to explore the unknown or be an innovator, get comfortable with experimentation. The more original your idea is, the less prior knowledge you’ll have about it. When Twitter was first invented, nobody knew for certain whether it’d work or not. Twitter was different from every other social media platform at the time. You couldn’t compare it to anything else, so you couldn’t take any meaningful guesses about what would happen. It required experimentation. There are some great interviews with Jeff Bezos before Amazon become the powerhouse it is today where Bezos acknowledged that he wasn’t sure if the idea was going to work or not. It seemed like it should, but he wasn’t guaranteed.

This is what tech companies do so well. Technology develops at such a fast pace that it’s important to quickly figure out what technology is coming out and how it can be used. Since the technology is new, nobody really knows for sure. Experimentation is key. Small companies, which are typically much quicker at responding to emerging technology come up with radically new ideas. Ideas that, with increasing frequency, are then bought up by the industry juggernauts for ridiculous sums of money.

Experiments can be big or small. Small start-ups typically stake their entire company on a single, innovative experimental idea. Small experiments are much more common. This is what you do when you’re solving a problem. You ask yourself questions like, what if I tried this or that? Then you run the experiment to see what happens.

As your creating today, think about what experiments you can run. What are you curious about? If you’re in the early stages of a creative project, try running wild experiments and seeing what happens. If you’re towards the end of a project run small experiments to see if you can improve on your design. When you’re done, be sure to spend time objectively analyzing what happened. Learn every lesson you can, apply those lessons, and then repeat the process with another experiment. This process can strengthen any idea.

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