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Michael Faraday, despite lacking formal education, made groundbreaking scientific discoveries through experimentation rather than mathematical theorizing. His playful, curiosity-driven approach is suggested as a model for tackling chronic organizational problems. Instead of repetitive pilots, organizations should embrace small, exploratory experiments to uncover underlying issues, fostering a culture of discovery akin to Faraday's methods. #SpotifyCoLeague, #MichaelFaraday, #ScientificDiscovery, #CuriosityDriven, #OrganizationalCulture, #ExperimentalApproach, #Innovation

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Colig Experience episode. Today we're diving into bold insights, fearless

(00:10):
experimentation and groundbreaking leadership strategies that challenge the status quo.
Inspired by the innovative spirit of Michael Faraday, we'll explore how embracing a playful,
experimental approach can tackle chronic organizational issues and unleash hidden potential.
Get ready for an invigorating journey into the world of creative problem solving. Let's dive in.

(00:35):
Michael Faraday was among the most productive scientists of the 19th century and this despite
never receiving formal education. He acquired his love for science while working as an apprentice
bookbinder. Fortunately for us, he apparently spent more time reading than binding and this

(00:55):
is how his unusual career as a scientist began. Faraday discovered the electromagnetic field
and electromagnetic induction, invented the dynamo and as if that wasn't enough, he also
discovered benzene and formulated the laws of electrolysis. Not bad for a bookbinder's
apprentice. The thing is, due to the unconventional way his scientific career developed, Faraday

(01:22):
didn't master mathematics like other scientists of his time. Faraday didn't let this bother him.
While he wasn't particularly gifted mathematically, he was an excellent experimenter. In Faraday's
time, it was already common to design experiments to prove theories that scientists had hypotheses
about, but he worked differently. Somewhat childishly, he conducted experiments to learn from their

(01:48):
results even when he had no defined hypothesis about what those results would be. This is
how he made many of his discoveries. He simply tried and tried until he discovered an interesting
phenomenon that he then studied until he could extract a scientific theory from it. There's
something charming about this method, something we've somewhat lost, the slightly childish

(02:13):
attitude that treats the whole process like a game, as if there are no timelines, no rules,
no methods. Just play. We think most of us don't allow ourselves this freedom in life
generally, but right now we're interested in the organizational arena. Let's take the
organizational parallel to experimentation. What do we call an experiment in organizational

(02:38):
language? Right. A pilot. What happens in real life when we try to deal with chronic
challenges in the system? There's discussion about a method or process that someone has
proposed. Some think one way, others think differently. We argue a bit, and then someone
always stands up and suggests, let's do a pilot. The ultimate solution. Pilot. Those

(03:06):
in favor get some progress to prove their point, and those against get a delay in the
decision. From this position, we plan the pilot. Usually, whoever plans and leads the
pilot wants it to succeed. How is pilot success measured? By proving their point and having
their proposal expanded to other areas. From here, there are several possibilities. Either

(03:30):
the pilot succeeds, and then it's apparently clear what to do. Or it fails, and then it's
also clear what to do. Or what happens in quite a few cases, there's disagreement about
whether it succeeded or failed, and what its relevance is to other areas in the organization.
And then what do we do? Back to square one. Back to arguing, we're exaggerating a bit,

(03:57):
but don't tell us you haven't been in a similar situation. We worked with a large
media agency that had been struggling for years with client retention. Every quarter,
they'd lose a few major accounts, and every quarter they'd launch another client relationship
enhancement pilot. One pilot focused on dedicated account teams, another on weekly check-ins,

(04:20):
yet another on predictive analytics for client satisfaction. Each pilot would run for three
months, show mixed results, and then the leadership team would spend another three months debating
whether the pilot worked or not. Meanwhile, clients kept leaving, and the underlying issues
around agency culture, creative quality, and strategic thinking remained untouched. In

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our opinion, in situations dealing with chronic challenges, those we've been trying unsuccessfully
to address for a long time, there's room to be a bit more like Michael Faraday, to
plan less and try more, to go with small, not particularly dramatic experiments whose
goal is not to succeed or fail, but mainly to learn more about the system, to experiment

(05:09):
with the hope that afterward we can try something new that we currently don't have the knowledge
to even think about. In parentheses, we'll say it seems to us that maybe it's time to
stop the boring and tedious lessons learned that almost no one ever implements anything
from. Instead of digging into the past, we suggest imagining the future. Instead of looking

(05:34):
for who's to blame or what caused what happened, maybe it's more interesting to talk about
what could be. Instead of investigating, it's worth imagining. When there's a chronic organizational
problem, one that keeps coming back again and again and doesn't disappear, it's usually
an indication of a story happening beneath the surface that we're not talking about,

(05:58):
or at least not talking about enough. Something that's in front of us and we can't manage
to see. We saw this pattern clearly in a pharmaceutical company where clinical trial delays had become
endemic. For three years running, trials were consistently six to nine months behind schedule.
The organization kept launching pilots around project management software, cross functional

(06:21):
teams and vendor management processes. Each pilot showed marginal improvements, but the
delays persisted. It was only when we started running small experiments, almost playful
investigations that we discovered the real issue. Senior researchers were terrified of
making decisions that might impact patient safety, so they were creating a elaborate,

(06:45):
informal approval processes that nobody acknowledged officially. The chronic delays weren't about
project management at all. They were about an unspoken culture of fear that had developed
after a previous trial had serious adverse events five years earlier. To avoid repeating
the same solutions, just in a slightly different variant, and discovering that reality hasn't

(07:09):
changed, the organization's leadership needs to learn to play, to dare to make attempts
that will broaden the perspective and expose parts of the organization's blind spots.
This requires courage because there's no knowing what these experiments will reveal,
and also because there's no orderly process that ends in certainty. If you will, you could

(07:32):
say that the role of leadership in dealing with chronic challenges is to discover and
bring out the child that exists in the organization and simply let them play. The beauty of Faraday's
approach wasn't that he was anti-intellectual or anti-planning. It was that he understood
something profound about discovery. When we're dealing with problems that have resisted our

(07:56):
best efforts, our best thinking, and our most carefully designed solutions, we need to admit
that we might not understand the problem as well as we think we do. We need to become
curious again, like children who haven't yet learned that some questions aren't supposed
to be asked. This means designing experiments not to prove we're right, but to discover

(08:20):
what we don't know we don't know. It means being willing to try things that seem small
or even silly, because sometimes the smallest intervention reveals the largest insight. It
means creating space for the kind of organizational play that can uncover the stories we've been
telling ourselves about why things are the way they are. Most importantly, it means accepting

(08:45):
that in complex systems, the path to breakthrough often looks nothing like the careful, logical
progression we think it should. Sometimes, like Faraday with his endless tinkering and
testing, we need to trust the process of discovery itself, even when we can't see where it's
leading.

(09:08):
That brings us to the end of today's podcast. We explored how adopting an experimental approach
like Michael Faraday's can reveal hidden problems in organizations, especially where
traditional methods fall short. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode
with your friends and colleagues, so they can also stay updated on the latest news and

(09:31):
gain powerful insights. Stay tuned for more updates.