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Experiment more often and more cheaply

“The next big opportunity never looks that way at the outset. Big opportunities grow out of successive rounds of experimentation.”

To evolve more rapidly, organizations must experiment more frequently. Management processes that seek to arrive at the “one best strategy” through top-down, analytical methods must give way to models based on the biological principles of variety (generate lots of options), selection (find low-cost ways to test critical assumptions), and retention (ramp up spending once a strategy has started to gain traction). In the future, top management won’t “make” strategy but will create an environment in which there is lots of fast-paced, strategic experimentation.

42 Stories
62 Hacks
5 Barriers

Experiment more often and more cheaply

“The next big opportunity never looks that way at the outset. Big opportunities grow out of successive rounds of experimentation.”

To evolve more rapidly, organizations must experiment more frequently. Management processes that seek to arrive at the “one best strategy” through top-down, analytical methods must give way to models based on the biological principles of variety (generate lots of options), selection (find low-cost ways to test critical assumptions), and retention (ramp up spending once a strategy has started to gain traction). In the future, top management won’t “make” strategy but will create an environment in which there is lots of fast-paced, strategic experimentation.

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Most companies have implemented “best practice sharing” processes that help identify local innovations and seek to scale them by providing corporate resources.  While well-intentioned, these effo
Hack by Colin Cunningham on June 14, 2012
Bilateral and multilateral donors and NGOs re-write the rules of the International Development Cooperation System to unleash the real potential of markets and the private sector to end poverty at a la
Hack by Lucho Osorio-Cortes on March 2, 2012
This hack is pinpointing some ideas for how companies  - which stand in front of challenge of rapid growth - should go about scaling themselves without losing their engaging, entreprenerial and e
Hack by Magdalena Pawlowicz on November 9, 2011
"Lock in" of talent may squelch passion, demoralize employees and of course lead to worse fit of talent to problems.  Top down delegation of tasks utilizes fewer minds thinking about what pr
Hack by Gisela Jönsson on July 5, 2011
Project Monitoring 2.0 is a collaborative systemic monitoring approach for project management to bring the “people” part of project activity into focus to get earlier insight into problems.
Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012
This hack considers how organisational capability might be unleashed by increasing the level of trust between employer and employee, borrowing from some of the concepts of Tikanga Maori and simply doi
Hack by Alister McCaw on February 25, 2011
College education is a priviledge and what needs to be decoupled is the notion that a college degee is a sufficient condition of a high paying job.  What I hear on the radio is "financial aid is
Hack by Kim Thi Nguyen on November 26, 2010

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