Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 5: Experimentation

It’s day 5 of the Squiggly Careers sprint, and today’s topic is experimentation.

Reflecting on this topic, I realise that I’ve been slightly short-sighted in how I’ve seen the topic of experimentation.

Certainly within work, I’ve always found experimentation difficult.. We would have an idea, get started on it, it would go down well, but then momentum would slow down.

I often found that the same challenges would crop up.

• The day job would get in the way of momentum, where an emergency would easily lead to follow-up meetings being cancelled, or people just not having time.

• Progress would depend on stakeholders from other departments, and they wouldn’t necessarily have time to prioritise your experiments.

• Working with global teams in different time zones would make it more challenging to keep momentum going.

Ultimately, there are challenges that anyone will face with experimentation. There will be inevitable hurdles stopping you from experimenting, and you need a significant amount of momentum and buy-in to get over them. The most difficult constraint to overcome might simply be the amount of time & energy that you personally have.

The best ways I have found to overcome these challenges are to find something that fits the following criteria:

• It energises you, and you feel passionate about it. If it energises you, then you don’t have to drag yourself to do it, and you will find the time.

• It is something that you have control over, and can do independently of others, so you remove that constraint.

• It is small enough that you can make progress quickly before other priorities start to kick in, or your energy starts to ebb.

For me, I delivered a seminar on confidence and resilience in the workplace, which heavily borrowed from things I had done with Sarah and Helen.

• It was something that I really liked talking about, and aligned with my values of helping people with developing their soft skills. It also was a nice fit for an internal initiative around learning & development that I wanted to support. (Shout out to Mike and Dave).

• It was something that I could do on my own.

• It was pretty much ready to go in my head, I just needed to get it all written down. This really didn’t take very long.

So my key takeaway from today’s podcast is that experimentation in the workplace can be challenging & constrained. Like so many things, you have to deliberate about what you are doing. It is so much easier when you can tap into your passions, and work on something that will not drain you further.