I’ve given three talks this week to very different audiences – but they shared strong themes:
My simplistic advice is Think Big, Start Small.
The evolution of the Bromford Deal began with just four people in a room talking about creating a new ‘deal’. We soon took three colleagues out of their operational roles and gave them a special remit – “what would we do if we started again?”
They operated in complete isolation for 12 weeks with a couple of ‘mentors’ dropping in occasionally. It was our own Skunk Works and a forerunner of what evolved into Bromford Lab.
After a raft of tests, pilots and detailed evaluation , Bromford has scaled the proposal, changed strategy, mobilised 130 new roles and is launching a transformed service.
Small empowered teams, bold tests, pilots demonstrating increased value to customers and improved cashflows have given us persuasive data to inform the business case.
More important than that is a culture that values the lessons learned when you are bold enough to attempt something that hasn’t been done before.
This week I spent a lot of time talking about rapid experiments .
Sometimes we need to scrap the comforting safety of product planning and project management. Instead, we should learn to practice high‐speed experimentation.
The examples I give in the slides of frugal experiments are deliberately frivolous.
What happens if:
As I said to one of the groups I spoke to. We know the answer to all of these things. That puts us ahead on the learning and adoption curve of new technologies at work.
It’s these practical experiments that show whether the fundamental assumptions about radical innovation are correct and what they mean for your business.
The challenge? Shifting our learning from slow and expensive to fast and cheap.