Solutions Require Scientists

Don't roll your eyes... 

This is not a call to hire more scientists (although I support that!). 

Scientist is more than an earned credential, or a profession. Scientist is a way being, of learning and problem solving. It is the rigorous application of a methodology for finding whatever truth there is to be found in what you're doing.

At its simplest definition, a Scientist is someone who develops and tests hypotheses. 

You are working to do something that has never been done. You are overturning a status quo you can no longer stand to build something better in its place. Your idea for how to do that is still just that - an idea. 

It may be perfect. It may succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Or it may fail miserably when it makes first contact with reality. Most likely, it is somewhere in between. Surviving that experience - taking the hit when your plan doesn't work - and learning what there is to be learned from that event will require you to consider your idea merely a hypothesis, a good but incomplete theory.

Getting from first good guess to a solution that actually works will require you to be a Scientist.

When you first set out, if you consider your plan a workable draft, if you consider your theory of success only a hypothesis, you put yourself in the right frame of mind to weather - and learn from - inevitable set backs.

Because of course it isn't going to all work out as planned!

If you hold too tight to your first idea, if you are convinced that you are already right, you run the risk of getting stuck. Or failing to learn from what your doing and wasting a whole lot of time and energy on things that will never lead to success.

Putting yourself in a Scientist frame-of-mind, calling your plan an hypothesis to be tested, reinforces the reality that there is data you don't have yet. There is critical information you can't have until you actually start doing the work of dismantling. Until you run your experiment.

The conditions you will create, the consequences of building your new reality, can't be truly known until you get to that point in the process. But you won't have to worry about how to deal with that uncertainty!

You will be in data-taking mode! You will be actively testing your theory. You'll be poised - lab notebook ready, pen in hand - to challenge your assumptions, fill in your blind spots, and build a better solution. A new idea for how to create the future that you will also test. 

Over and over until your work is done.

---

References:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Mastery by Robert Greene

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath