#567 How to use Tiny experiments to make progress at work | Tiny Experiments

0:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:The only experiments that fail are when you fail to learn. I think this is such a good definition of what I mean by a good mistake.

0:09Anne-Laure Le Cunff:What is a tiny experiment and how do we design one? Try at first to only run one experiment at a time. Finish your experiment and then you can design the next one. There's always going to be uncertainty but what you can change is how you respond to it. Trying to be in control, clinging to those plans or you can respond a little bit more like a scientist getting curious and saying, okay, I'm not quite sure what's going to happen here. How should I get started? I'm going to use this space to experiment. I'm going to use this space to learn, to learn about myself, about my work and about the world around me.

0:43We make a mistake in our team, you share it on the same day. Also to stop the mistake magnifying. Any mistake you learn from is a good mistake.

0:51Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Nice.

0:56Hi, I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we borrow some brilliance from a person, a place, sometimes even an object, and turn that curiosity into useful action for you and your career. And this week, I have the borrowed brilliance with me in the room. And if you're not watching, don't worry, you'll be able to hear it along the way. And this is a very special guest. So we've got Anne Law with us, who I think lots of you will already follow on LinkedIn. And if you're not, you should be. Who wrote an amazing book called Tiny Experiments. And do you want to know the worst thing about writing a book that I think is that we wrote Learn Like a Lobster, which has a whole chapter on experiments.

1:36And Anne Law's book hadn't come out. And so the thing that makes me most sad about our book is that you are not in it. And so I need to do a second edition because we have all of our expert insights in Learn Like a Lobster. And we've got, we talk about experiments. We finish writing and then your book came out. And I was like, no, because it is fantastic. So it's OK, though, because that's what podcasts are for, right? So welcome to the podcast, Anne-Laure. I'm so excited about our conversation today.

2:05Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Thanks so much for having me. And I feel like what you just described first has happened to me as well, where I then talk to authors or discover books and I feel like, oh, why didn't I know about it before writing my book? But also very aligned with what you write about and what I write about in my book. This happens because we keep on learning. So it's not a static thing, right? So it's bound to happen. It is. It's just this one in particular. I was like, oh, it's so connected. But you're right. I mean, the whole point of learning like a lobster is that we never stop learning and growing. So you're telling me something I already know.

2:37So we are going to start with one of my favorite quotes in the book that I'm going to read out because I think it helps to frame the conversation. And so you say, and you write so brilliantly, it's such an amazing mix of, it's my favourite mix, of research, evidence, it's super credible, really thoughtful, but I also understand it all. You know, like, I get it. And you say, linear goals promise certainty. If we just stick to the plan and climb, we will arrive safely at the expected destination. But life rarely follows such rigid and predictable patterns. Experiments are built for the in-betweens.

3:13They propel you forward, even without a fixed destination, in constant conversation with your inner self and the outer world. It got a double underline. And so I wanted to start, before we talk about designing a tiny experiment and what that might mean in your working week, what does it mean to have an experimental mindset?

3:36Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I really think about an experimental mindset in contrast with a linear mindset. And I think it can be helpful to use a mental model to think about them. So the mental model of a linear mindset is the one of a ladder. So you have a clear plan with clear steps and you tell yourself, if I climb this ladder in the right order, if I go through these steps in the right order, then I'll get to this place of success. And as I say in the book and in this quote, unfortunately, life doesn't quite work like that. So in contrast, the mental model of an experimental mindset is the one of a loop. So it's the idea that you don't really know where you're going.

4:20Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Instead of starting from a place of certainty, you try to start from a place of curiosity. You start from a hypothesis or a research question. And you say, let me give this a try. Let me go through one cycle of experimentation. Let me collect my own data. And whatever the outcome, even if that outcome is not what I expected, I trust myself to learn from that result and then use that data to design a new experiment to go through another cycle of experimentation. And you do such a brilliant job in the book. You have a really lovely table which shows linear mindset versus experimental mindset. and you describe that mental model you also talk about response to uncertainty and I think I'm seeing that word a lot at the moment like people feeling particularly uncertain the world feels very uncertain and you were saying in a linear mindset we kind of have that automatic response right the kind of fight flight or freeze which typically never is never that useful it's very natural but probably like not that helpful and then you talk here about being kind of autonomous So what does that mean?

5:28I was just thinking so many people will be feeling uncertain in their career. I've spoken to a lot of people this week who are going through redundancies or restructures. How can perhaps when some things feel like they're happening to us, what would it mean to be autonomous, do you think?

5:42Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So being autonomous is really about reconnecting with your sense of agency. When we're faced with uncertainty, there is a temptation to try and cling to any kind of blueprint that someone might give us. Yeah. And this is why. Exactly. Give me a plan. Give me a recipe. Just tell me what to do. Right. And this is also why we see on social media right here are the three steps to be successful. And the problem with that is that very often we try to copy paste those blueprints, not taking into account that our circumstances are probably very different from the ones of the person who shared that blueprint.

6:19Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And when it doesn't work, we don't question the blueprint. We question ourselves. Exactly. We blame ourselves. Being autonomous is saying, OK, I'm sure this worked for you, but I have my own circumstances and I'm going to experiment with different ways to see what works and what doesn't for me. And I don't really know where I'm going. I'm not really sure what kind of results I'm going to get, but I'm not going to make decisions in an automatic way. And I'm not going to try and copy paste an algorithm for success from other people. yeah I think it's a really dangerous starting point isn't it to think oh well it worked that way for them so it's going to be exactly the same for me could end up feeling very demotivating and what I like about this idea of being autonomous that you talk about is you're making a choice about something you can control which would be okay I'm going to do some tiny experiments I can I can do that doesn't matter whether I've got a really tricky manager I'm in a very hard team at the moment.

7:20I'm maybe going through a restructure or I'm loving life. I'm like really enjoying work. We can all make that choice to create, design some tiny experiments for ourselves.

7:30Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah. And you're making, I think, a really good point about how it's all about our response to uncertainty. So you can't really get rid of it. No. Right. There's always going to be uncertainty, but what you can change is how you respond to it. And you can either respond to it by trying to be in control clinging to those plans or you can respond a little bit more like a scientist getting curious and saying saying okay i'm not quite sure what's going to happen here there is a lot of uncertainty fine but i'm going to use this space to experiment i'm going to use this space to learn to learn about myself about my work and about the world around me and so what is a tiny experiment and how do we design one?

8:16And after each of the, you have a sort of way of designing a tiny experiment and kind of walking through it. After each one, I'd love to hear an example either that you've heard from your community. You have loads of people trying out tiny experiments because I sometimes read about them, you know, in your newsletter or someone will just share it on LinkedIn and probably because we're in the same world, I'll be like, oh, they're trying out a part of the tiny experiments or even your own, your own experiences of each part. And particularly when we get to certain parts, there are some bits that have actually really challenged my thinking and perhaps some of the ways that I've approached things so far.

8:51So I was like, I really want to pause on those to see, you know, maybe how it might help me to reframe my own experiments. So, yeah, what is a tiny experiment and how should I get started?

9:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yes. So a tiny experiment first is an experiment. So what is an experiment? What I did is that I basically tried to strip down everything that is not essential to run an experiment. So if you're a scientist working in a lab in a university like I am, we have to apply for money, funding. There is a lot of admin work. You need a lab. You need all of these things, right? But if you remove all of that, what is an experiment? An experiment is deciding on something you want to test and a trial period. That's it. That's what an experiment is. So you're going to test something you're curious about and you're going to do it for a trial period.

9:40Anne-Laure Le Cunff:This is why when you read research papers, you see scientists say, we tested this intervention for six months or with 200 people, etc. So a tiny experiment is saying, I will try this action for this duration. You need an action and a duration. Yeah. And a tiny experiment is tiny. And this is where I really encourage people to keep that duration quite small at first. When people discover this concept of having an experimental mindset and designing experiments, they get a little bit excited. They're like, let me run five different experiments for 12 months. And they then don't complete the experiments because it becomes quite overwhelming.

10:25Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So the idea here is that if you want to collect your own data, if you want to see if it works or not for you, just start small. Start with maybe one week or a couple of weeks. Try the thing. See what happens. If you love it, then you can do it for another bigger cycle. That's completely fine. And it works for really anything in your life and work. I've seen people experiment with, I will meditate for 10 minutes every morning for 10 days. Action, duration. I will post on LinkedIn every day for two weeks. That's a tiny experiment. I will reach out to an industry expert every Monday for six weeks.

11:05Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I will action for duration. So you can experiment with mindfulness, with the way you communicate, with the way you run your meetings, with the way you don't have meetings. Maybe you could say, I will not have a weekly team meeting for three weeks. And let's see what happens, right? So always I will action for duration and start with a short duration. And so talk to me about PACT because this is where I've got some detailed questions. This is where I've got circles. I've got multicolored post-its at this point. So let's go through each at 10 and I might ask you a few extra questions if that's OK.

11:43Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Absolutely. So something that kept coming up when I started creating this method is people were asking me, But what makes a good tiny experiment? And so the acronym PACT, P-A-C-T, I created it for two reasons. The first one is because really when you design an experiment, you're making a pact with yourself. You're committing to curiosity. You're committing to collecting your own data and withholding judgment until you're done with the experiment. So that's why it's called a pact. And then PACT stands for P, purposeful, A, actionable, C, continuous, and T, trackable. So P, purposeful. It's very important that you choose an experiment that you are actually curious about, that is meaningful to you.

12:33Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So again... Okay, you're not doing it for the sake of it. Exactly. Or because you think you should. Exactly. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, not because you're seeing other people around you doing it, right? Not copy-pasting, right? So that's purposeful. And what's great is that when each tiny experiment is purposeful, you don't need to find a grand purpose in your work and life because you just figure it out as you go. Then actionable. Something I hear people say quite often is, I wish I could do this. I wish I could try this experiment, but I don't have enough time, enough money.

13:04Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I don't have the right professional network. I tell them, start with something you can do right now that you can actually experiment with, with your current resources. And this is what actionable is about. Something you can do right now where you have no excuse to get started. Okay, that's good. Then continuous. So when you have more of a linear goal, there's this target, right? You do it and either you fail or you succeed. With an experiment, you want to do it several times. You want several trials. You want to see if there's a pattern. You want to learn from repetition. And this is why it needs to be continuous.

13:40Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So this is why you say, I will do this for five days. two weeks, a month, three months. So it's not a one-off activity. Exactly. I don't experiment by trying it today and then deciding. Yes, exactly. So you really need to have that repetition. And that's what becomes interesting with the data, right? Because at the end of the experiment, you can say, oh, I said I was going to do that every day for two weeks. I only did it maybe, you know, half of the time. Was it because it was a particularly busy time? Was it because I didn't have the right resources? Was it because the task was maybe a bit too ambitious?

14:17Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And you can start understanding what worked and what didn't so you can keep on iterating. And the last one, T, trackable, not measurable like in SMART goals, trackable. So it's not about having big dashboards and complicated metrics. The only thing you want to track is whether you did it or not. Yes or no. that's it so if you say i will do this thing for every day for five days every day you can even use a habit tracker that you repurpose for this and just go yes or no and that's it so this is where i get a bit stuck because so i do i'm a big fan of outcomes and you say um focus on outputs you know like did you do the thing that's that's being trackable right rather than outcomes and then I was I was getting a bit stuck on oh but I want the outcomes there's usually a more zoomed out outcome I've got in mind um and I think if we get too output focused people get very focused on the task but maybe forget why they're doing the task yes so what would you say about outputs versus outcomes to help me that because that's a bit of a block or a barrier for me when I think about this, especially because I think I advocate outcomes over outputs quite a lot in the work that I'm doing with companies.

15:37And so it may, you know, when it makes you pause and you think, do I need to rethink or have I not understood properly?

15:44Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah, this is such a good question. So when I talk about outputs here and focusing on the outputs, it's while running the experiment, while completing your pact. So the idea here is that when a scientist runs an experiment, they don't start poking at the data while they're still running the experiment. And so what you want to do is really complete your pact, complete this action for the duration you commit it to. And only when you're done, you can analyze the data. And so that's why while you run your pact, you only track whether you did it or not. And that's it. That's all you should be doing.

16:19Anne-Laure Le Cunff:At the very end, I have other tools later in the book. and actually structurally maybe it would have been more helpful to have them closer in the book so it was clearer but I have tools that are all about reflecting on the results but that happens afterwards let's see if I've connected the right dots and you can totally tell me I'm wrong so plus minus next yes is that okay talk to me so I was going to ask you about that in a bit but I think let's do it now because that's kind of where we are in the conversation it also got a post-it note which is that's me kind of picking out going ah so is this is this how I reflect on the experiment as a whole does that have I connected the right dots there absolutely and it's so interesting especially talking about this with a fellow author because we actually went back and forth with my editor yeah so many times as to where to place them in the book right and so I'm not surprised that this happened with you reading it where they're a little bit further apart and so maybe harder to connect.

17:20Anne-Laure Le Cunff:But yes, that's what comes after the data collection. So a pact is a commitment to collecting your data and withholding judgment until you're done. You're just curious at this stage. Just let's do it and let's see what happens. And only when we're done doing the thing, then, just like a scientist, it's time to analyze the data. And this is what plus minus next is all about. It's a reflection tool that's very, very simple. It has three columns. In the first column, plus, you write everything that went well with the experiment. In the second column, minus everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, and this is the most important column, it's not just a static snapshot of what worked and what didn't.

18:05Anne-Laure Le Cunff:This is how you create a loop by saying, okay, based on what worked and on what didn't work, what am I going to tweak in my next iteration to have more of the plus, less of the minus, more of what worked, less of what didn't work. Yeah, it's a really good build on one of our favourite feedback tools. And one of the ones that stuck the most with lots of the organisations we work with is what worked well, even better if. So we would often use that. So that's basically your plus and the minus, right? Similar thing. But I was thinking, oh, actually, probably what would help that tool to be even better for behaviour change or for action would be what worked well even better if what next because you've done you've done the fast reflection that can be we're like we're doing that not just on experiments on lots of things but that really helps to commit people to action because I think that's the learning loop that you talked about and I think maybe one of the things that's useful to remember I think maybe sometimes I forgot when I was like connecting dots was it's a tiny experiment because I think when I'm thinking about outcomes I'm not thinking about tiny experiments you know I'm thinking about big goals that I've got or things that I want to achieve but actually in the context of a tiny experiment is like keep it really simple track it almost be curious but don't do what I think I'm sometimes guilty of doing is I think I judge too fast because I'm naturally questioning I start questioning before I've even got to the to the end you know like you've got to give it it's not even that long right it's only like a week but it's just the way that my brain works I sometimes quite fast start to go oh maybe I've not designed it in quite the right way or maybe I've not quite done the right thing so you've just got to you know like hold it just hold on for long enough to let the experiment finish I think it's actually a very common thing that happens with people I work with because the kind of people who are drawn to having this experimental approach are usually both very curious and very ambitious yeah and that combination means that this is why I had to say very explicitly please wait until you're done collecting your data before you start making changes because I know how strong the temptation can be to optimize on the go while you're on the fly while you're still running the experiment what's a tiny experiment that you have tried out that you feel like you've learned a lot from so I'm sort of hesitating to say oh this worked really well because I feel like that misses the point of why we experiment it's sort of I think it matters less whether it worked really well it's more but did we learn loads from it um and maybe you've kept iterating on it or it's just had a positive impact or you've made a change as a result because you must have tried out loads of tiny experiments as part of this process yeah I think I want to go with an experiment where some people might say it was a failure and I don't think it was a failure.

20:59Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I think it was very successful. So that was my YouTube experiment. Anyone who has been posting on social media, doing thought leadership or anything like that, at some point has probably heard people say, you need a YouTube channel. Yeah. Right. That happened to me. Some people will be watching on the Squiggly Quiz YouTube channel right now. And that happened to me too. I have a newsletter and a lot of friends started saying, you need a YouTube channel. So So that got me curious enough that I said, OK, let me run a tiny experiment. So it was towards the end of the year and it felt like a natural stop.

21:35Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I said, let me run a tiny experiment until the end of the year. I will publish one video every week until the end of the year and let's see what happens. I did that. And what was really interesting, and I also talk about that in the book, is that I looked at both the internal and external signals of success. external signals subscribers likes comments etc looking pretty good pretty encouraging internal signals every time i had to sit down in front of the camera and record myself i hated it yeah absolutely hated it and because i was dreading this moment i also was procrastinating on everything else during the days where i was supposed to record so at the end of the experiment after I was done collecting my data, I looked back, I did my plus minus next.

22:23Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I realized that actually there were too many minuses in the sense that it was really affecting the rest of my work and that I really liked writing better as a medium to share my work. So I stopped posting on YouTube. And so the reason why I say some people might say she failed at YouTube, she failed at this project, right? For me, it was a huge success because now whenever someone says, hey, why don't you start a YouTube channel? I can say, oh, I can tell you why. I can tell you why. I actually gave it a try. And this is not for me. And so I don't have that cognitive load anymore, this thing in the back of my head saying, oh, maybe, maybe you should be doing this.

23:05Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I tried it. I experimented with it. And now I know that I want to focus my time and my energy on other things. It's a really good example we've had a similar experience on things like tiktok people are like why you know on tiktok because people used especially you know people in their early careers are using tiktok a lot for careers advice and we did a similar thing i think do you know what i think our team because our team have all read your book our team had read the book and they they were trying to persuade me basically to have a go and i was relatively resistant um and i was like okay well if we're going to run it as a tiny experiment i'm way more up for it and that's one of the things i like about tiny experiments and experiments generally it takes away the pressure to be perfect and puts all the emphasis on progress you know on doing something and I think the the genius of the tiny word makes it even easier and I think you should never apologize for make things easy I think it's good because it's easy to get started there's not many barriers it's actions you can take and so we were like right okay we'll just start reposting small things that we've done like on a TikTok in TikTok in the right format partly because I was like I'm not creating new content for for talk I don't want I don't want to be that and I also I know I won't enjoy it and then it's really it's been really useful because also then it's allowed me to give our team like space to just experiment without me getting in the way and asking too many questions because we've said oh no we're going to experiment for six weeks almost so I just leave it alone because I'm like well we're experimenting for six weeks that's what we've said and I think I feel reassured because I know that after six weeks we'll look at the data we'll look at what we learned like did we put something out every week what's the data telling us and then I feel like you make better decisions I think part of experiments the bit that I find really appealing is then because you're experimenting and you've got all these learning loops your decision making and your choices improve because it's based you know like you could keep going with that YouTube channel but that would actually be a really bad choice for you but now you've got sort of like the data to help you feel confident in that decision.

25:08Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yes. And it's your own data. That's the most important thing, I think. So I feel like part of experimenting is that you will, they will fail. And you talk in the book about this idea of good mistakes. And we do quite a lot of work on mistakes and this idea of mistake moments, because I think people have a really tough relationship with making mistakes sometimes I'll ask people um I did it this week actually a big conference it's like shout out some words uh to me how do you feel when you make a mistake and some of these words are visceral you get I always get shame usually the second or third word and you're like not often you say shame and work you know like in a work setting so you get shame disappointment, angry, frustrating.

25:56People feel awful about making mistakes. So I think just exploring this idea of good mistakes might be a helpful kind of reframe. What do you mean by a good mistake?

26:07Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Well, I don't phrase it like that in my book, but since the book came out, I heard you say something where I think you said something along the lines, correct me, but of the only failure is the failure to learn. Yeah, we have a quote. The only experiments that fail are when you fail to learn. So that was my moment of, oh, that was so good. I wish I had heard it before I finished writing the book. Because I think this is such a good definition of what I mean by a good mistake. Any mistake you learn from is a good mistake. Nice. Yeah. And I always think if you say to people, look for the learning.

26:45So I think when you make a mistake, you can get so distracted. by those emotions that you forget to look for the learning um and I was reading some really interesting research that shows you know like we like to think we learn from our mistakes but because we like patterns and we do things that we've done before actually if you don't look for the learning the most likely outcome is that you'll repeat the mistake yes that's quite disheartening so I was like oh actually if we could encourage everybody you know to go into that learning loop to look for the learning when you make a mistake then actually you will start you've I just think you'll feel more comfortable experimenting because I think it's almost inevitable that the more we all start experimenting you know you'll make some mistakes with those experiments maybe it'll feel safer for people though you know in the framing of the word experiment I wonder if it will help