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Failure's Okay: Safe-to-Fail Probes and the PEARL Flywheel
- Randall Rogers
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From Week 8 of Leading Through Complexity
Week 8 brings us to the experiential sequence of the Complexity Leadership Model, Steps 5 through 7, where insight turns into action. If the diagnostic sequence is about exposing difference and the dialogic sequence about amplifying it, the experiential sequence is about integrating difference: discovering what works by trying things.
Why Experiment at All?
For much of the last century, organizational strategy was built around stability, efficiency and optimization. The world was more predictable, and those strategies still matter to some extent. But since the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, things have become increasingly unpredictable.
So instead of stability, we need agility. Instead of more efficiency, we need innovation. And instead of optimization, we need experimentation.
On a complicated project, we know where we are, we know where we want to be and, for the most part, we know all the steps to get there. On a complex one, we may have a lightly held vision and even a hypothesis about how to get there, but we don't fully know the steps or the causal links. The only way to find out is to probe.
What Is a Probe?
Probes are about adapting and discovering new possibilities within the system. We're testing the system's evolutionary potential to change. Probes help us explore patterns and possibilities without overt pressure to succeed or fail.
"The whole notion about probes is that we can fail."
That's not a loophole. It's the design principle. A probe is a small, safe-to-fail experiment: small enough that failure is affordable, and designed so that whatever happens, we learn something about the system.
This is also something you'll need to convey to the leaders you're working with:
"Failure's okay."
For many executives that's a difficult message. But in this sense probes are actually a very effective risk management technique. Instead of betting everything on one large initiative, you spread the risk across many small ones and learn fast.
Many Probes, in Parallel
The second principle surprises people even more. We're not looking for the one right experiment. We're looking to maximize the variety of probes, introducing multiple parallel probes, many of which could be contradictory in nature.
This isn't about whittling down to some big-bang change initiative in the singular. It's about many small nudges at once, each testing a different hypothesis about how to create more like this and less like that (the direction of travel from Week 7). Then we amplify the probes that move us in the right direction and dampen the ones that don't.
Probes are also where we engage the edges: the edges of thought, of application and of invention. Often the most useful experiments come from the people closest to the work, not from the center.
PEARL: The Inner Flywheel of Change
To coordinate all this, we use PEARL, which I describe as the inner flywheel of change within the Complexity Leadership Model.
Plan. Establish a new adjacent-possible condition, then lightly plan the work.
Experiment. Initiate multiple parallel, safe-to-learn probes, micro-nudging the system in the desired direction of travel.
Assess. What happened, relative to what we thought would happen?
Reflect. Ask a series of "why" questions and capture your thoughts in a reflective learning journal.
Learn. Summarize course corrections across the whole cycle and state what you'll do differently in the next learning cycle.
Then the flywheel turns again. Each cycle makes the system, and the people in it, a little smarter about what works in this context.
Measuring What Matters, Indirectly
How do you measure a complex change? Not only through traditional KPIs. In the experiential sequence, we monitor direct indicators, indirect indicators and weak signals.
One example is the shifting mix of stories people tell. When a probe is working, you often hear it in the stories before you see it in the numbers.
When something works, we scale it organically through case studies, town halls and innovation forums, so that people across the system can see it, adapt it and make it their own.
Try This
Pick one complex challenge and design three small probes for the next two weeks: one obvious, one unusual, and one that contradicts the first. For each, write down what you expect to happen. Then run a single PEARL cycle and compare.
Watch the Short
Watch on YouTube: The PEARL Cycle
Subscribe to Echoes From the Edges for more: Echoes From the Edges on YouTube
More From This Series
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