Having an experimental mindset helps leaders and teams open a variety of possibilities and a free flow of ideas. Seeing the things you try as experiments orients you to collect data and evaluate whether the experiments or things you try are working or not. Sometimes a team will luck into things that work but many times they don’t. When things don’t go as hoped, we fail. An old friend of mine says, “Education is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” And education can feel like a consolation prize in the race to innovate. It isn’t about whether it feels bad to fail (it does), but how to emerge resilient and ready to experiment again. To fail better, experiments need to be safe-to-fail, small enough to iterate often, and there needs to be a plan in place for data collection and decisions about the next steps....
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