Have you ever been in a post-activity meeting to discuss the outcomes of an event, and whether the plan in place was properly followed? If so, this a case of after-the-fact learning or rationalization that follows traditional business planning. Classical business planning calls for creating a plan, execution of the plan, evaluation of results, and looping back to minor adjustments of the initial plan. However, Eric Ries warns about “achieved failure” or successfully, faithfully, and rigorously executing a plan that turned out to have been utterly flawed” (2011, p. 22). In order to combat achieved failure, the Lean Startup method calls for validated learning, which is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup present and future business prospects (Ries, 2011, p. 38). The reasoning behind finding these “valuable truths” is to carefully craft an experiment in which data-driven hypothesis are tested before vast amounts of financial capital, time, and efforts are spent on a given idea. While this theoretical reasoning based on the scientific method sounds complex, its application to business and startups is simpler than it looks.
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