When you are following my current podcast series around AI and start-ups in the Experience space you have already seen or heard (hopefully) the curiosity and excitement that is part of these conversations. In fact, I make sure that in the preparatory calls to the actual podcast recording I am not asking too much, not learning too much to still discover jointly with the listeners while we have the conversation. You may say that this is bad research on my part – but for me it is an integral part of how I approach my conversations. I want to be curious, I want to be exploring and I want that the listener or viewer can follow along and we discover and learn together.
This though requires from the onset a foundational level of curiosity and openness. However, very often I am questioning if we still have this curiosity in our daily business context? Are we open to explore new ideas and new solutions to certain problems? and how do we do this with the rigidity of an RfP process and watertight contract at the end of such process? More often than not I am worried that we are in fact judgmental and not curious. We have our list of questions, we have our list of wants, we have our list of criteria – to not get surprised, to not make the wrong decision. This is good and all right when you try to buy a commodity. But in the Experience space I don’t yet see any commodities – in fact in the wider HR Technology space I do not see any commodity coming our way. The current times are more interesting than the last 20 years altogether. We will see so many new ideas – good ones and bad ones – and we will see so many companies coming, going, leaving the market, being left behind, merging, resurfacing, being acquired etc. How can we as HR & Experience professionals make sense of this? How can we profit from that?
We need to stay curios (and not judgemental). We need to be open and willing to listen and learn. We need to be willing to experiment and fail – quick. Not only with internal ideas and projects, but also with external partners. We need to be risk-taking, especially when we want to test & learn on new exciting ideas. These tend to come from small start-ups that usually don’t have the full infrastructure of an established tech vendor and often times don’t fulfil all the criteria that your compliance, security and privacy departments insist on. These functions are built to secure the organization, to ensure no harm is made – no surprises. But no surprises also means no experiments, no learning. We all know the expression “no risk, no fun”. I believe in a similar expression for us as Experience practitioners: “No risk, no progress”.
Break out of the rigid ways of identifying the fitting solution to your list of criteria, be bold and open-minded to search, find and listen to young companies and start-ups around their solutions and how they add value (of course there always has to be a value equation) – and then experiment with them, show them how companies like yours work (for them to learn and have a chance to become an established vendor some day) and learn about their approach and idea. But how when you have all these security, compliance and privacy gates? Find a subset in your organization where you can contain any risk that you are opening up to. A subset that still allows you to learn but where a complete failure or exposure can quickly be contained. Be creative with your new partner in experimenting and learn fast, scale faster if successful, provide feedback and move on as quickly if you fail.
If you don’t try, you will not have a chance to be at the forefront of Experience – and you will not have a chance to co-develop with young firms or start-ups to find solutions and ideas that work best for your company. The Experience space is still so new, so exciting that you would leave out a lot if you are not open. Be curious today. If you don’t know how – subscribe to our EX Labs podcast where we will share exciting start-up and young company’s stories – as well as talk to seasoned experts that have worked with start-ups, helped scaling and making them successful. You can only learn – that is why I do these recordings and what I take from them: Be curious and you will grow every day. Be judgmental and you will mis out on the future. What will you do?
