"test out the future"

"it is characteristic of complex systems that small actions can make a disproportionate impact. You just don’t know, won’t know, until you try. And try again.

...

What makes people and institutions abandon old bad habits and acquire new, better ones? Some argue that pressure eventually produces a tipping point, while others maintain it’s all about the cogency or timing of the message. When large corporations and institutions require strategic change, investors and participants demand a theory of change that promises to contain or define their risk. But the test of a good theory is that it can predict—and what we know about complex systems is that, while aspects of them may repeat, they are inherently unpredictable. So theories of change in highly dynamic systems might purport to offer certainty, where it often proves most illusory. The value of experiments is that they disrupt apathy, acknowledge ambiguity, and give people hope.

...

Experiments are pragmatic ways to test out the future, but to have real impact requires that other people contribute.

...

traditional management is addicted to grand plans. However much executives claim to want, and to support, innovation and so-called transformation, much of their enthusiasm runs tepid to cold. They want safety and certainty, not the creativity and risk that come with experimentation. The irony is lost on no one: the more they demand certainty, the more they constrain their chance to discover a safer future.

...

Nowhere has this constraint been more obvious than amid the bloodbath of retail, where companies seem to have taken to heart Hilaire Belloc’s line: “always keep ahold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse.” So afraid are they of failure that they plan shop closures and layoffs with meticulous efficiency—while failing to be inventive enough to keep those businesses alive. Market analysts may call this creative destruction but it’s hard to find much that’s creative about it. Experiments and innovation are almost nowhere to be seen."

Trechos retirados de "Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future" de Margaret Heffernan.

Pequenas experiências

Em defesa da descentralização, da desconcentração, da experimentação, das pequenas tentativas:

“A bold decision always looks good—until it is wrong. To facilitate evidence-based decision making, managers must carry out frequent experimentation to diminish the dark space of ignorance and to arrive at conclusions with the required level of familiarity. Critical assumptions must first be identified and then proved right through rigorous experiments.
...
took an evolutionary approach, ran numerous experiments, before hitting a pivotal moment. This is how the strategy process under uncertainty should be managed: create enough opportunities so that relevant evidence can emerge—but once clear, full steam ahead.
...
THE REFRAIN “IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING, ANY road will take you there” captures the importance of managers developing a point of view about the world. But awareness is not the same as commitment, so insights alone never suffice. Because strategy and execution are inextricably linked, “unless ideas are translated into everyday actions and operational tactics, a pioneer is still at risk of being displaced by copycats. More often than not, the role of a CEO needs to go beyond strategic visioning and into the substance of strategy implementation, particularly during turbulent times.” [Moi ici: Interessante fazer a ponte para o que os prussianos aprenderam: estratégia é uma intenção geral que tem de ser executada no terreno por gente perante situações concretas impossíveis de prever à partida]

Interessante esta nota:

“The Japanese don’t use the term ‘strategy’ to describe a crisp business definition or competitive master plan. They think more in terms of ‘strategic accommodation,’ or ‘adaptive persistence,’ underscoring their belief that corporate direction evolves from an incremental adjustment to unfolding events.”

Excerto de: Howard Yu. “Leap”.

Discipline: experiment and prune

"S+B: How can companies identify their best growth prospects?
YU: It’s critical for organizations to experiment. If they don’t, sooner or later they will run into a crisis. They’ll end up having to bet the house money on a single initiative. Some people would call that a burning platform, and sometimes it works out. But oftentimes it doesn’t.
Instead, companies should focus on experimentation, and then see which idea ultimately generates a big win. This demands that the organization have the ability to form new business units along the way, because when we’re talking about commercializing disruption, the last thing you want is to ask your mainstream business to try a radical idea.
At the same time, you need to have the discipline to prune. When you experiment, there will be failures along the way, and large, complex organizations often find it difficult to let go of projects. Politically, it’s very hard for executives to declare failure and walk away. Projects drag on, consuming resources. But if an organization truly embraces the spirit of experimentation, the implication is that executives have to call a all a failure early enough to cut their losses. And that requires a cultural shift."

Trecho retirado de "Howard Yu Disrupts Disruptive Innovation"

Somos o que fuçamos

Uma frase que li algures recentemente e que me ficou no ouvido:

Não começamos a fazer arte assim que nos tornamos artistas. Ou seja, não é por sermos artistas que fazemos arte, é por fazermos arte que nos tornamos artistas.

E começar a fazer arte começa por fazer asneiras, por testar, por experimentar, por esticar a corda, por conhecer os limites e, por ganhar uma identidade.
.
Este testar e experimentar é o:

• As pessoas e as empresas com futuro experimentam, são como as crianças;
• Empresas e crianças: experimentar para inovar.

Assim, gostei muito deste texto de Tim Kastelle, "You are what you try":

""Whoever tries the most stuff wins. (WTTMSW)"
...
If whoever tries the most stuff wins, then you are what you try."

Como não recordar a frase com que começa o artigo inicial sobre o BSC, “The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that drive performance”:

“What you measure is what you get”

Recordar também o tão português fuçar.

Shift happens! (parte II)

Parte I.
.
Ontem à noite li este artigo "The missing part for business model innovation: The process"e não pude deixar de sublinhar este trecho:

"almost every firm needs a different approach to innovation and strategy.
The future is not about prediction but about shaping the future with agile experimentation on what works and what does not work.
Regardless how much you plan, you will not predict the future because neither customers nor companies can anticipate what is possible. The only way to push for radical innovation is to accept the uncertainty and thereby accepting that with more traditional planning we can not predict the future.
.
By saying so, I do not mean that we need no planning or management anymore. We even need it more than ever, but with a different aim. The aim should not be to predict the future but to plan a creative process how to shape the future."

A ênfase na experimentação e no "shape de future".
.
Este "shape the future" choca violentamente com uma visão estática das coisas tipo "vantagens comparativas dos recursos portugueses".

Experimentação

Não há coincidências, todos os acasos são significativos...
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Enquanto oiço "Adapt" de Tim Harford, onde encontro coisas como:
.
"we’ve already seen that bottom-up often beats top-down, and we’ll see even more powerful examples of that tendency later. But this is the point: the world is complicated. What works in the US Army may not work in a rural Javanese village. The lesson is to keep experimenting and adapting, because a single success may or may not replicate in other contexts.)" (Moi ici: Um apostar na humildade e na experimentação)

...

"‘We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops’" (Moi ici: Há dias, ao ler algures uma notícia num jornal sobre a quantidade de gente que procura casa para alugar no Porto e, sabendo que há muitas casas vazias no Porto, lembrei-me de Goldratt e da teoria das restrições. Pensei, "Os políticos não deviam lançar-se em tentativas de mudar o mundo, podiam começar por coisas mais comezinhas, como, removerem as restrições que as partes numa sociedade encontram. Que constrangimentos impedem que oferta e procura não se encontrem?" O mesmo para o secretário do Estado para o empreendedorismo... removam barreiras, não queiram deixar heranças)

...

Vou encontrando na net mais e mais exemplos desta abordagem experimental em pequena escala:

• "Thinking Big? Then Think Little Bets" ("Everyone wants to make big bets. Be bold. Go big. But the irony is that people routinely bet big on ideas that aren’t solving the right problems.")
• "Intuition Can't Beat Experimentation" ("You can imagine how disappointed he was when, having spent some time with him (and his wine), we told him we had no idea what the “right” price was and that the magic number didn’t exist. He almost took away the wine he’d already poured for us.
  .
  In an attempt to save our drinks, we did offer him help. The help was a method – no magic, equations, or superior knowledge – just a simple experimental design. This article provides a brief introduction to a new and exciting field in behavioral economics: experimentation in firms... The main takeaway is that in many market instances, experimenting (rather than guessing) is the most accurate, simple and often the cheapest way to know how to approach a challenge, be it the pricing, presentation or promotion of a product. ... So why don’t businesses experiment more? ... Another barrier is that managers feel they’ve been hired to provide solutions and make tough decisions to enhance the firm’s performance. In other words, they feel they are expected to have ready answers for the challenges the firm faces. Opting for experimentation may appear to imply they don’t and could compromise their level of expertise – as if they have failed to do their job.")