A Story About Lights
Let’s start with a story about lights (it gets good – trust me).
With South Africa plagued by loadshedding, I recently decided to buy solar lighting for my garden.
If you’ve ever shopped for solar lighting, you’ll know it’s not a fun experience. Price isn’t a great indicator of quality and choosing a product is a bit like getting a box of chocolates (Forrest Gump reference).
Picture me at my local hardware store agonising over which lights to buy.
I knew I needed at least 5 lights (adding up to a sizable investment). They had to all be identical, all needed to work properly and needed to look good when lit.
It’s impossible to test the lights out in-store because they need time in the sun to charge (obviously) and unless you’re willing to spend hours googling, it’s hard to find online buyer reviews.
I also needed to mount them to a wall to allow them to charge, so returning them to the store afterwards wasn’t an option.
In short, I was making this decision under significant uncertainty and making a wrong choice would result in a waste of my time and money.
Imagine my wife’s bemusement when I arrived home with only 1 light.
Validated Learning
It turns out that what I was consciously (albeit not explicitly) doing was applying something called validated learning.
“The Lean Startup” is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in startups. There’s some good stuff in there (seriously, go and read it) but one of the key topics that Eric Ries unpacks is validated learning:
“Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects…It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.”
Eric Ries The Lean Startup page 38
In essence, validated learning is a real-world application of the scientific method.
You have a hypothesis, you run some experiments, you get some results and they either validate or invalidate your hypothesis.
Simple enough.
When used effectively by startups, this can be a really powerful methodology for discovering data about a product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
It allows startup founders to rapidly test assumptions and hypotheses by making small, incremental investments. This means they can quickly learn whether or not they need to pivot or persevere with a particular product or business model.
But should validated learning be limited to only business decisions?
Experience in a Lab Coat
By making a small, incremental investment in a real-world test of one solar light, I was able to prove my hypotheses about this particular brand and product.
(By the way, the lights look great and work better than expected. I now have a full complement of 5 lights and my wife is happy.)
We do the same thing when we take out a free trial before we purchase a full software subscription, or take a car on a test drive before we buy it.
In fact, it’s no different to when a high school kid does a job shadow programme to see if a particular career or company really is for them. Or when someone tries a business idea as a side hustle before they quit their day job and devote all their time to it.
I’d even argue that dating is just a series of small, incremental experiments to test how compatible you are with someone before starting a serious relationship.
If we consider what this looks like in a professional sense, we could say you’re gaining experience.
And that’s all validated learning is.
When applied in our daily lives, validated learning is just experience dressed up in a lab coat.
We often think of experience as something gained in the passage of time and I don’t doubt that there’s a strong causal relationship between time and experience.
But why shouldn’t it be possible to rapidly gain experience by using validated learning in our personal and professional lives?
Using Validated Learning in Everyday Life
We’ve all been there before.
You’ve invested time, money or energy into a project, job or relationship and when it doesn’t work out you invariably find yourself saying: “I wish I had known…”
By running small, incremental experiments to get more information about decisions that matter, you can significantly reduce the chances of making bad decisions that result in a waste of time, money or emotional energy.
Let’s test some examples:
| Problem | Experiment |
| You’re about to buy a home but are worried that the travel time to your office is longer than you’d be comfortable with. | Do a timed test drive from the house at the time you would normally leave work. |
| You want to quit your job to join another company but aren’t sure about the workplace culture or team fit. | Take time off from your current job and ask if you can spend a day at the company with your potential new team. |
| You’re convinced your business idea is the next big thing but have a bond to pay, so can’t immediately quit your job. | Try it out as a side hustle for a set period of time to see whether your idea is as viable as you think. |
| You’re thinking of getting a dog but aren’t sure how your kids will react to a pet in the house. | Offer to look after a friend or family member’s pet for a day or two. |
I’m not advocating for applying validated learning to every decision. That’s impractical and unrealistic.
But it is entirely possible to run small experiments to help you get more data to make a range of important decisions in everyday life.
By consciously and deliberately looking for opportunities to gain validated learning, you have a much better chance of being right more of the time.
I can’t find a better way of describing why this matters than Roger Skaer:
Leave a Reply