Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
The Leading for Innovation set consists of the following modules:
You are in the Prototyping and experimentation module
Prototyping and experimentation
The big idea: failing often and fast to succeed
We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.
David Snowden, complexity thinker and educator
We’ve all had what we thought was a good idea that then flopped in practice. Equally, we’ve probably got to the end of a few projects and realised what we should have been doing all along. The Experiment phase of the innovation cycle is all
about 'thinking-through-doing' to help you design around risks, and highlight those things you should have been doing all along, before it’s too late.
By making our ideas real in small tests (what designers call prototypes) we can involve many more people in their development, in spotting risks, and in designing around those risks. Here we make our ideas tangible and real so that more people
can get involved and have their say.
In innovation approaches, we are often trying to create new things, and with new things there is often no evidence of their usefulness. The experiments we create are a good way of generating evidence that the idea will work and make the most
of our resources. This is essential to convince others that it is worthwhile to take the idea forward.
Prototyping as a way of experimenting
In innovation approaches, our 'experiments' are not like the ones we learned in the lab at school or the ones that are used in scientific endeavours across the work. Those 'experiments' are about testing a hypothesis – proving whether an idea
is right or wrong by careful analysis and data gathering. For innovation approaches, we need an experimental approach which still focusses on gathering good information but which is much more open and broad – trying out anything that might
improve what we currently have.
In public service innovation, we can again take a leaf out of the Design Thinking playbook and use 'prototyping' as our 'safe-to-fail' experimental approach. Prototyping involves making ideas seem real in order to gain more detailed feedback
and stimulate new ideas. There are many ways of making services seem real including storyboarding, role-play and simulations – you will learn more about these techniques later in this module.
James Dyson, billionaire inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, is one of Britain’s most famous prototypers. Over the five years he spent designing his breakthrough invention, Dyson created many, many prototypes; each time learning something
new; failing quickly and cheaply in some way that told him how he could make it better next time. James Dyson couldn’t have his early ideas setting people’s homes on fire or ruining their carpets, just as you can’t have your prototypes
putting your users at risk. Therefore we use prototyping not to run away from those risks, but to engage with them actively and safely.
Your role as a leader in the Experiment stage
The motto of prototyping is: ‘fail earlier and often to succeed sooner’. This means that we make prototypes as quickly and cheaply as we can to learn about how our service should work. Once we have learned one thing, we can change our prototype
to focus on the next thing we need to learn. However, the idea of 'failure' is often very scary, especially to people who are just starting out on their careers or people who have succeeded by making sure they get things 'right first time'.
If you want to 'lead for innovation', regardless of your position or seniority, your primary role is to encourage failure – with your curiosity, your confidence in people's ability to find a way forward and your backing when things get
tough!
By the end of the Experiment stage:
- you should feel confident that your idea can work and make a difference
- you should feel that you have tested the trickiest and most promising elements of your idea
- you should feel that all the groups that have a stake in your idea have been involved in prototyping at some point
- you should be excited about telling the story of what you’ve done
- you should be excited about moving into the delivery of your idea.
The rest of this Module will take you through the Experiment stage in more depth and offer a variety of methods that you can use to prototype and test your brilliant ideas in a very practical way.
Continue to: Prototyping and experimentation
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