Whenever you want to launch a new initiative in your career, approach it as though you are running an experiment.
This ensures you don’t over-commit yourself or others to something that could ultimately work against you, instead of serving your long-term career goals.
An experiment is simply testing a hypothesis in a controlled environment. It doesn’t need to be overly rigorous to provide valuable insights.
The point is that by structuring your initiative as a mini-sprint, you’ll make more informed and effective decisions.
Here’s what you should consider BEFORE committing to something new, whether it’s a project, collaboration, or career change:
- Understand what you’re solving for: Define the outcome you’re actually wanting from this new initiative.
- Design an experiment to test this: What can you do that will give you a good answer in the shortest time?
- Identify the conditions of your experiment: What does your ultimate initiative need to be sustainable?
- Lower the cost of gaining information: Think about how quickly you can gain insights or learn from failure with minimal downside.
- Go all-in, but treat it like a sprint: Once you start, commit fully to the experiment as a focused effort, but make sure you stop the experiment once you’ve gathered the insights you need.
- Define your next step: Use the information gained to decide what to do next. Don’t mistake the experiment for the initiative you ACTUALLY should be committing to (or not).
By treating new initiatives as experiments, you are minising the downside and gaining focus on how you can actually maximise the upside (instead of starting something which could become challenging or costly to stop).
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