After all, it's just an experiment!

People are going to peg me as a Peter Bregman groupie.  Oh well, there are worse things, I suppose.

Bregman wrote another post last month that has stuck with me ever since, called Live Life as an Experiment.  In it, he tells a story of an experiment in which he returned an item to a store and tried to get out of paying the 20% restocking fee.  His experiment succeeded; he appealed to the store manager’s generosity and avoided paying the fee, and learned that many people really do want to be generous, given the chance.  But he drew a much bigger lesson from this, which appeals to me a great deal.  And that was,

Live life as an experiment!

“Because when we live life as an experiment, we are far more willing to take risks, to acknowledge failure, to learn and develop. That's what experiments are all about: discovery and growth. There is no real failure in an experiment because it's all data. If something doesn't work, that's simply data that leads to changing behavior to see if something else does work.”

Bregman's argument suggests to me that I might be willing to do something I would normally find embarrassing, if it’s an experiment.  Take, for example, business cold calling!  Something I’m horrified at the thought of doing, for a number of reasons which are probably pretty sound.  But what if I made an experiment of it?  What if the point was to see whether a cold call resulted in a meeting, or in a hang-up?  If the goal of the experiment is simply data, then either result is OK, right?

What other business related icky projects could I turn into an experiment?  How would this mindset improve my willingness to take a risk?  What could I learn from it?

Who knows, it might even result in increased business!  Now, wouldn’t that be grand?