INSIGHT on INSIGHT: Learn & Test before you Test & Learn

I used to regularly hear a joke about the fact that two kinds of companies exist:

Those that fire first and then try to aim at the target afterwards

Those that take so long to aim that they often miss the opportunity to shoot

The first type is willing to fail fast and make corrections along the way.  They operate on the belief that it is easier to steer a car as long as it is moving forward.  Turning the steering wheel of a parked car accomplishes nothing.

The second type operates with a high degree of risk aversion.  The fear of failure becomes one of the biggest barriers to finding success.  They get hung up working on theory or ideas or the pursuit of perfection and don’t put enough of it into practice.

A supposed happy medium between these two extremes is where the principle of test & learn exists.  The basic idea is to try things on a small scale, learn what does and doesn’t work, and move forward with a revised plan built on what did work.

However, this mentality has lead many to ignore the bigger opportunity to first learn & test.

LEARN & TEST

Companies that use shopper insight for guidance understand the importance of going through learning phases before actions are taken.

A learn & test mentality focuses on answering the majority of relevant questions first.  This allows initial actions to be pointed in the best possible direction. 

It allows things to go wrong in a controlled environment where few casualties will exist.

Revisions and improvements may still be needed to optimize plans or executional details, but they typically represent finalizing the last 10% to 20%, not rebuilding 80% of the idea.  A learn & test approach should eliminate the waste of time and effort on projects that are far from viable or unable to deliver the results expected of them.

This also prevents launching a dog of a product and then wasting more time, money and effort trying to have it deliver on unrealistic expectations it will never meet.

On the other hand, a typical test & learn approach (that skips a learn & test phase) can consume significant resources that never result in meaningful, scalable actions.  Lots of time and money can be spent on half-baked ideas before fatal flaws are revealed.  The learning reveals that the test was worthless.

In the rush to get something into the market, the memory of sunk costs and the lack of a better plan B pushes bad ideas into existence.  And it causes small ideas with limited upside to be scaled up to much bigger plans with inflated, unrealistic objectives.

Test & learn assumes that any idea can be made better and bigger.

Learn & test seeks to first identify the biggest and best ideas among viable options.

If your company has had a high failure rate or you’re working on projects you know aren’t capable of delivering the expected results, consider stepping back and reassessing how projects are approached.

Odds are probably pretty good that spending more time to learn & test will not only save significant resources, but produce bigger and better ideas more likely to deliver the results your company needs to grow sales.