If you’re stuck … experiment.

The earliest reference I have for the phrase “the pace of change has never been greater’ is 1969 but I reckon generations going even further back probably said the same thing. It depends where you’re starting from.

Shawshank fan’s may remember a 70 year old Brooks Hatlan, having served 50 years, being paroled in 1954 writing back to the fellas inside “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry”. Before Brooks’ time the industrial revolution, circa 1760 to 1900 depending on your sources, influenced almost every aspect of people’s lives, and did so at an incredible pace. Life, in its fundamentals hadn’t changed for centuries before that. And I have a sneaky feeling when the Romans rolled into town the locals had a similar experience.

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Reginald, People’s Front of Judea - Life of Brian

So this experience of unprecedented change has been around for a while. For each generation it is relative to the foundational state. My own grandparents went from homes with no electricity or running water, to the first flight and moon landings. They experienced World Wars, social revolutions, empire collapses and, in later years, having seen the revolutionary introduction of the telephone, to chatting over the internet with video.

I wonder what each of us will be able to say played out in the course of our own lifetimes? Being born pre-internet, my own life has already spanned significant changes. And there is plenty of change ahead.

It can feel a bit much at times. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, the next thing arrives. With it comes an ever increasing demand to keep learning – and to do so at pace just to keep up with the basics. And oddly, despite the change, we can feel really stuck - not knowing what step to take next.

The good news? We have super adaptable brains. Neuroplasticity, the neuro-scientists tell us, is one of our superpowers.

So how to use that to best advantage?

One of the best learning tools we have is to experiment. Experiments are wonderful ways to focus in on one aspect of an issue and see what we can find out. They can be large or small. They may have a hypothesis, they may not. They may work, they may not. If we are wise, not matter the outcome of the experiment we will learn something. The more we experiment the more we can learn.

In his book Think Again, Adam Grant encourages us to think more like scientists. To adopt different tools and run experiments in the pursuit of knowledge. Studies suggest he’s on to something. A European study in 2020 found that the group of entrepreneurs encouraged to view their startups through scientific goggles averaged $12,000 revenue over to following year compared with less than $300 for the control group. They brought in the revenue twice as fast. Other than this lens, the training for both groups was identical.

What does adopting scientific goggles look like in practice?

It means approaching everything as an experiment. Consider your strategy as a theory of what might be possible. Use customer and stakeholders to help develop hypotheses to test your theory, and use minimum viable products to test them. Key to this is really noticing what is actually happening – not what you hope is happening. Look as much at things that disprove the hypothesis as things that confirm it. Seek information from different sources and angles. When the hypothesis is not supported, rethink and try again.

Adopting scientific goggles is a way to un-set our set minds. It is so easy, having struck on what seems a brilliant idea or plan to use, to become so dedicated to making it work we miss the signals that tell us something different is needed. If an idea, plan or course of action needs to change that doesn’t make it a failure. But failure to learn will.

As the speed of change, the interconnectedness of the world, the reach and nature of the complexity increases, we need to learn as fast as we can. Anyone grappling with AI right now can feel that. Anyone raising our next generation (and trying to keep up with let alone ahead of them) can too.

We don’t have as long as previous generations did to learn. But we can learn from them. The development of concrete is, well, a concrete example of how experimentation, and innovation, can play out.

Around 5000 years ago people did some pretty amazing thing with what they had to hand. Using mud, natural bitumen and gypsum the Mesopotamians and Egyptians created mortar that was strong enough to build walls, ziggurats and pyramids in dry climates. That mortar didn’t work so well in different environments – it was soft, brittle and degraded in rain.

By the first millennia BCE, the Greeks had learned from this. They adapted the mix for their needs, using burned limestone and sand. Hellenistic builders improved on this again adding crushed pottery and ash making mortar more durable and consistent. These were significant improvements – the mortar was much stronger and predictable, and lasted better over time in different conditions.

But it wasn’t until observation of the natural world yielded a fresh insight that a significant breakthrough came about. One that would see the Romans building aqueducts, ports, breathtaking domes, and other incredible structures that heralded major technological changes for Reg and his friends. The breakthrough insight came from noticing that ash underwater in the bay of Naples had set hard – rock hard. The addition of volcanic ash to mortar led to systematic application of the mortar at scale. And the Romans did scale really well.

As anyone lucky enough to have seen them will know, many of these great structures, held together with different types of mortar, stand to this day – from the Great Pyramids to Roman aqueducts.

There are some pretty clear things we can adopt for ourselves when we experiment:

Use what’s at hand. What is in your environment – perhaps it’s a bit left field - that might be helpful? Perhaps you have an equivalent to bitumen or ash but you just haven’t noticed it yet.

Learn from others. What have others tried that might be useful?

Take one step. You don’t have to start with an aqueduct or pyramid – just one step will get you started.

There are some less obvious things worth remembering:

Think big. Start small. Move fast. The Egyptians tried a few smaller projects before they were able to pull of the Great Pyramid of Giza for Pharaoh Khufu.

What works in one place doesn’t necessarily work for a different setting. Mortar for a Great Pyramid doesn’t work for a great aqueduct. What is your context telling you?

Small changes can lead to big breakthroughs. The Hellenistic builders were onto something adding in a bit of ash. When pozzolana – a particular type of volcanic ash from Naples – was added it was a game changer. In other words, breakthroughs can be closer than you think. Tinkering has its place.

Everything we do is essentially an experiment—if we do X in the hope of Y, we are experimenting. We often disguise experimentation as strategy and plans. But in an inherently unpredictable world where cause and effect can’t be known in advance, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

You’re likely running experiments right now. Strategy for a business outcome, policy for social change, products for customer experience, projects for environmental impact. They’re all essentially experiments. Why - because these all play out in an unpredictable world, where cause and effect can’t be known in advance.

The trick is to put on your scientist goggles and actually learn from them.

Brooks was right. The world got itself in a big damn hurry. And it’s not slowing down.

Anyone grappling with AI can feel it. Anyone raising the next generation can too. We don’t have as long as previous generations did to learn.

But here’s what we do have: the same adaptable brains that got our grandparents from no electricity to moon landings. The same capacity for observation that led someone to notice volcanic ash setting hard underwater. The same ability to tinker, test, and try again that built everything from pyramids to the internet.

The pace of change isn’t slowing down. Those who learn fastest won’t be rigid and stuck. They’ll be like concrete—enduring, evolving, getting stronger as knowledge increases.

So if you’re stuck, experiment. The breakthrough might be closer than you think

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