Business | Experimentation


late 1970s, the feedback was lukewarm: one focus group member moaned: “Why would I want to walk around with music playing in my head?” What neuroscience does tell us is that, if we are


developing something radically different, allowing people to experience it as soon as possible, can help us accurately assess the merit of an innovation. Sony’s focus group experience was atypical. As Liedtka says, most of the time, these exercises lead to encouraging, but expensive, false positives. Companies can also fall foul of the say/do gap - data on what customers say they will do is, ultimately, is not as reliable as data on what they actually do. Customers are not infallible - as Henry Ford famously remarked, if he’d asked the American public what they wanted before the launch of the Model T Ford, they would have said faster horses - but they can prove invaluable. For instance, a poll of consumers before Ford launched the ill-fated Edsel in 1958, might have revealed the fact that some buyers disliked the new model on the Freudian grounds that the grille reminded them of a vagina. It is a truth, far from universally acknowledged,


that well constructed experiments can challenge the status quo, management hierarchies, existing timelines and cultural assumptions. As Liedtka has said: “The very human desire to avoid error, to think of disproved hypotheses as mistakes, rather than a process of learning, is hard-wired in all of


MOST


ORGANISATIONS ASK FOR INNOVATION, BUT HAVE LITTLE TOLERANCE FOR FAILURE


us. It doesn’t help that most organisations ask for innovation, but have little tolerance for failure.” It doesn’t help that we, as a species, are genetically hard-wired to fear uncertainty, and inclined to resent those who confront us with it. Often, we are so conditioned that we ignore the spectacularly obvious. In one of the most famous experiments in occupational psychology, spectators were asked to count the passes between players wearing white shirts in a basketball game. They became so focused on this task that many of them completely failed to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking across the court even though, at one point, he stopped and pounded his chest. Researchers were confounded when a large minority of their subjects insisted they couldn’t have missed this incident even when they were shown footage of it. These findings come as no surprise to Liedtka. As she has noted: “We search for - and find -the data that supports our favoured solution and find it hard to even recognise any data that challenges that. This predisposition is so strong that, even when this bias is pointed out to many leaders and managers, they fail to correct it.” These blinkers may owe something to the way we train the next generation(s) of managers. As innovation consultant Tim Ogilvie puts it: “When you think about it, we have traditionally coached managers to be decisive, when we should probably be coaching them to be curious.”


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