Doug Garnett wrote a blog post titled Complexity and Experimentation: The Rebellious Bee (12 June 2025).
« Rory Sutherland tells a story about bees… Without rebellious bees the hive would be less resilient and less likely to survive… All complex adaptive systems are also only healthy when exploitation of what is known (e.g. pollen sources) is balanced with time exploring things critical to future health. It is for this reason that JP Castlin talks, then, about the need for continual “safe-to-fail” experimentation in business as all companies are complex adaptive systems. All companies, then, require continual exploration if they are to be healthy. Of course, he calls these “safe-to-fail” experiments because they must be affordable enough — or constructed in safe enough ways — that they don’t sap the company’s ability to survive. »
« [Some] companies find the idea of continual experimentation to be incredibly uncomfortable because it opens the door to all four types of uncertainty JP and I discussed in the second article. Making matters worse, too many companies respond to these uncertainties by adding bureaucracies hoping to control risk — bureaucracies which ensure exploration fails. »
« A first great error companies make is to attempt to rid themselves of employees who sometimes rebel. This error, then, compounds when they decide to run experimentation with a bureaucracy. »
« To be clear, rebellious bees don’t head out to do “just anything” … It seems reasonable to assume they make wise use of their time based on clearly understanding the business of the hive. So, too, in companies. »
« Instead of directing exploration, then, it should be overseen with a type of lassez-faire management enabling individuals and their teams to explore what they perceive as critical without having to continually justify their choices. Thus, companies should rely on those employees (perhaps 20% to 30%) who rebel against rigid management yet comprehend what matters to the company business. This is not to open a free-for-all. Rather, companies should minimize the management interference which kills the value of experiments while ensuring employees work wisely and report what they are doing. »
«Companies far prefer, though, that employees be passive, rule following bees unable to see what William Whyte (The Organization Man, 1956) observed: This the administrator cannot conceive…that a man [or woman] can dislike the company…and still have made a net contribution to the company cash register infinitely greater than all of his [or her] better-adjusted colleagues put together. »
« Resilience from Continual Experimentation. »
« Experimentation must not be isolated only to R&D efforts. Companies need to pursue a continual thread of experimentation in every department, project or operation. »
« Many brilliant inventions — perhaps like some notable ones from Xerox PARC — succeed only outside the company because the rest of the company is incapable of adapting to make them work. I once wrote a series of blog posts with four primary and seven secondary diseases known to kill innovation. These posts noted how a dictatorship of KPIs, best practices, and formal risk management often kill innovations. Why? If something is truly innovative, KPIs, best practices, and risk management must change or the innovation fails. These rigid controls are put in place, after all, to ensure stability and not to enable adaptation. »
« A valuable result from experimentation is not always an important innovation. Often experimentation is needed to discover ways to maintain current business as markets, industries, and customers change. In other words, these results avoid revenue losses… A simple example of avoiding revenue loss might have a cruise ship replace its deck chairs. This might be expensive … but also won’t increase the number of passengers — it only keeps from losing passengers. »
« The ultimate gold-standard result of experimentation is an innovation which can dramatically affect future demand for company products and/or services. Companies must always explore if they are to have sufficient demand for products and services in the future. »
«Experiments of this type, though, are always less certain in their results than loss avoidance experiments. Hence, savvy companies need to stage such experiments to ensure spending increases only as returns from experimentation sufficiently justify the next cost (though “sufficient” is a vague term only possible to judge — not to calculate). I have found two important truths around uncertainty in these experiments.
- In their earliest phases, paths to superb new opportunities are often murky and ill-defined. Critically, they rarely shout out their potential. Yet if we pursue only those opportunities clear in the beginning we will not find the demand needed in the future.
- Uncertainty will never be fully resolved as we develop future demand. Instead, it remains present until rollout proves the potential. All along the path, then, work must focus on learning without trying to solve the whole problem all at once
As a side note, companies should rely more often on thought experiments as early steps. »
« Experimentation has been co-opted to serve the process of seeking investment and satisfying shareholders. I will call these “performative experiments” as their goal is to prove to possible money sources that the company is experimenting. Of course, such “experiments” don’t need to be productive learning — they must only drive investment or shareholder satisfaction. In part this is a result of incredible hype about experimentation.
As an example, I have come to believe many “radical” ideas announced by Amazon primarily offered shareholders an excuse for unprofitability… And Elon Musk’s long list of claimed invention is also a list of performative experimentation as seen in this Wired Magazine article. »
« Healthy companies, instead, always have some degree of chaos — even potential mutiny. I particularly love this quote from automotive executive Bob Lutz about his time at Renault: We often had chaotic meetings, where some of my direct reports engaged in behavior that an outsider would have termed insubordinate bordering on mutinous. But that’s when we had the clearest communication and surfaced ideas and opinions devoid of the buffering wads of tissue paper designed to avoid hurting someone’s feeling. »
« No company, it turns out, can be healthy unless some portion of its work force focuses on what is important while ignoring unrelated and interfering corporate orders. Bureaucracies, though, hate how this idea rejects their idealized belief that orderliness is next to godliness. »
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