Jargogled Impressions.

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
~ Thoreau

Experiment comes from old Latin ‘experiri’ that translates to “try”. When we try out something new, we experiment. As experiments go, they could be small and tiny modifications (micro-experiments) in a test environment, to bigger and monolithic design experiments² (transformations) in a sandboxed state where the right to succeed is more loosely structured than in the real world. Even failed experiments or morally dubious ones¹ face a renaissance every now and then given their experimental design threw open such wide deflections in our understanding of the world. In dealing with business experiments, leaders who are prone to more than less, are often venerated. While old, stodgy, and immune to change organizations are castigated for their lack of imagination. Experiments are often bundled together with imagination – especially in areas with more objective domains like science and technology. Their applicability to real world bring experiments closer to reality than purely theoretical thought exercises that ancient science forms like philosophy and human psychology sometimes take.
We need to experiment more with our lives. As kids, our world revolved around experimentation with the objects we saw around us. Through interacting and engaging with them did we find out whether they burned, they cut, they dissolved, or they broke. The true properties of things we get accustomed to around us continue to evade us as we grow older. Leaving aside the physical reality, in our inner lives too, we are prone to discarding experiments with age-worn understanding and perceptions. Especially so with our biases firmly intact, our worldview increasingly, for the most extent, becomes a sad replica of itself, so encumbered it is with our opinions and our mental models.
We don’t think of experimentation often enough in our lives. Both in organizations and personally, the more experiments you work on, the greater your chances of grasping or learning something new. Experiments strengthen our confidence and belief in an assertion through independent confirmation. Experiments help reframe our biases and perceptions that may not be relevant any longer in the world we live in today or were plainly wrong and dysfunctional from the start. Designing experiments in our lives (personal, professional) can help eliminate these deflationary thinking and steer us towards the right path through a journey of self-discovery versus borrowed wisdom.
The idea of fail fast and try harder is baked into the technology-led world we live in, exemplified at large by the technology companies that excel at designing their product development process to emphasize fast, iterative delivery – in a sense, through an agglomeration of experiments. These companies subject willing or otherwise participants or trial subjects in their experiments – an advantage not many industries can tap into. For most of them, experiments are costly and often do not justify working on something that may not work at higher level of confidence than others where they may think they are standing on more solid grounds. Of course, none of this can be predicted and success from an experiment or from a full-blown delivery isn’t guaranteed. But the thing with experiments is that they consider this probability of losing into their very reason for existence.
Experiments provide you a way to fine tune and clarify your goals. For experiments to be successful, they need to be measured. Often in our lives, we end up relegating to the periphery the idea of measuring the things, the effort, the hours that we are committing. Experimental way of being consciously steers people to isolate the metrics and actively measure them for the duration of the experiment.
And that brings me to another benefit from thinking about designing your life around experiments – they are time-boxed and have a finite life span. Given their finite nature and the constant option of moving back to the default, the status quo, the before – we feel less disinterested or discouraged into working towards an experimental goal. It saves us from high expectations from ourselves and lets us vest our energy and thinking into something we know could very well go away in a short period. So, for startups as an example, smart people with bad ideas³ can very well experiment on a couple of failed experiments before they hit pay dirt. Further, software within startups are essentially vehicles for experimenting with its own design⁴. For experiments to work, they are reductive and not universal in the scope of things they target. Focusing on scale and global operations for a startup can essentially kill the idea before it has time to germinate. Hence the need to keep the experimental hat on.
Now that I have waxed eloquent on the benefits that come from experimentation in our life, let me get to how we can ope-rationalize this concept into our ways of being and operating. How can we instill in ourselves a spirit of active experimentation? To answer this question, we need to target the inhibitory factors that stop us in our tendency to experiment. Here are some myth busters that may help us wrap our head around why we are not experimenting with our lives more frequently:

• Experimentation is for the weak
• Experiments are like playing with toys
• Most experiments do not translate to real world
• Designing experiments require strong understanding of what we are after
• Experimental design is key to experimenting more
• We don’t have time to indulge in experiments
• Experimentations are like turning a giant tanker at its peak speed
  The first step towards being experimental is to discard these perceptions. If we manage to do that and keep an open mind towards the tasks that we normally chose to do in the world, then we could potentially design our lives around millions of these micro-experiments. Experiments then evolve to “deliberate practice” where you have figured out what you want to work on and prioritize. From thereon, compounding of our efforts and our skill-building can take a whole another level.

Sources / Notes:
¹https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
²https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/500-year-long-science-experiment/581155/
³http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
⁴http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html
Even Ill-fated sociological experiments have a shelf-life.

• Milgram experiment: obedience to authority figures
• Little albert experiment: classical conditioning in humans
• Monster: study on stutter and negative feedback
• The Aversion Project: medical torture program
• Operation Midnight Climax: effect of LSD on un-consenting adults