Experiment & Adapt
Adaptability and Experimentation Maintains Practice Relevance in a Rapidly Changing World
“The new, entrepreneurial experience of work is very different from the mass-industrial experience. It is about acting into the unknown, not necessarily working towards a known goal. It is more about improvising together than creating and following a script. It is more about emergence than rational causality. It is more about sciences of complexity than systems thinking.”
In the past, organizations competed by optimizing productivity, efficiency and predictability with long term planning. Relying on planning was important because high transaction costs made it difficult to change course once decisions had been made, resources had been committed, and people and teams had been coordinated.
Today, plans start losing value the moment they're finished. Because we can't predict the future, time and resources devoted to planning are a less valuable investment than embracing agile methods that encourage experimentation and fuel rapid learning. The opposite of planning doesn’t have to be chaos. Responsive organizations still need a long term vision, but make progress through experimentation and iteration.
