Getting better doesn’t always mean making major changes. You don’t necessarily need to start from scratch or change what’s already working. Instead, getting better often comes down to small things, like testing a new approach or trying a new follow-up email.
Ron Friedman, a psychologist and the founder of Superteams Inc., surveyed thousands of workers across various industries to uncover what the best teams do differently. What stood out? The “superteams,” as he calls them, experiment relentlessly. Without the freedom to try things, he says meaningful progress is impossible.
In this issue of PromoPro Daily, we share his simple guidelines to make experimentation part of your regular workflow.
Don’t Miss A Thing: SUBSCRIBE To PPAI Newslink
Keep failure small. According to Frideman, the best experiments provide useful information without costing much time or money. He says psychologist Amy Edmondson calls this “intelligent failure.” Consider the Australian real estate firm, Landlease. Instead of spending months developing a new service, they ran Facebook ads inviting customers to join a waitlist. For just a few hundred dollars, they confirmed demand. And even if no one had signed up, the experiment would still have been a success, saving months of wasted effort.
Remember to stretch. Once you’ve minimized the cost of failure, he recommends testing many things, not just the obvious ones. Maybe you reach out to a new type of buyer or bundle merch in a new way. The most meaningful experiments may not always work, but they should involve some level of risk. If all your experiments feel safe, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re not thinking big enough, he says.
Err on the side of learning. When it comes to selecting between experiments, Friedman says you shouldn’t just pick the one that’s most likely to succeed. Choose the one that will teach you the most. For example, you could learn that a certain category resonates more than you thought or that shorter emails get you more responses. As long as an experiment delivers a valuable insight, it’s not really a failure, he says.
Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect. Go ahead and try your ideas anyway. By keeping staying curious and treating every outcome as a chance to learn, you can build a team that keeps improving.
Compiled by Audrey Sellers
Source: Ron Friedman is a psychologist and the founder of Superteams Inc., a learning and development company that teaches leaders science-based strategies for building high-performing teams.
