How to create a flexible organization that adapts quicker than your enemy

Summary - To fail is to learn. Therefore your entire organization should revolve around failing as quickly, safely and in the cheapest way possible.

To fail is to learn

The one key thing that makes one organization better than another, is that the better organization learns faster. This is explained brilliantly by Jeff Bezos:

“What you really want to do company-wide is maximize the number of experiments you can do per given unit of time. If something’s really big – like the big bet we’ve made on Amazon Web Services – then sure, you can do only a limited number of those, so you spend more time thinking about them and talking them through. Somebody wears the black hat and makes the case for why not to do it, and somebody else puts on the white hat and says why it is actually a good thing to do. But since the outcomes of all these things are uncertain, if you can figure out how to conduct an experiment, you can make more bets. So the key, really, is reducing the costs of the experiments.”

So, if you have an idea, test it. Value experimentation over discussion. The only way to truly know whether an idea is “good” or “bad”, is to execute said idea in a experiment where a value hypothesis is defined and metrics to measure the outcome. This is one of the core premises of the Lean Startup and explained beautifully in that book. More information on how to execute an experiment as a project, is explained in the principle everything is a project. Learning is best done by doing it, as theorized by “the cone of learning”, which coincides perfectly with the experimentation mindset.

• Elon Musk: “Constantly seek criticism. Assume you are wrong, your goal is to be less wrong.”

• Reduce the costs of experiments, but please experiment. A good way to ensure a lot of experiments in the organization is to make use of the adobe kickbox.

• Think in physics approach, do not reason from analogy but assume fundamental truths. Then you can see what really makes sense, and not in how everybody else is doing. Then you can figure out counter-intuitive things.

• Beyond a certain point, The time that it takes to make a decision does not improve the chances that a decision is correct. A certain percentage of your decisions will be wrong. Not deciding or procrastinating at a decision makes it wrong per default. Plan and prepare for everything, and you will never act.

• From Reeds, Netflix: “Foster a culture that values people over process, emphasize innovation over efficiency, have very little control”. The latter part can be expressed as: have a decentralized organization that enables anti-fragility and front-level decision making.

• Do not change for change's sake. Simply adept when necessary.

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