Brian Walch presents STARSHOT, a framework that lets any employee run small, low-cost experiments instead of betting everything on big moonshots. The approach treats outcomes as learning, not failure, and spreads innovation across the whole organization.
Aspirational experimentation was born out of the idea that every employee wants to contribute to the success of the organization and has ideas to do so. Now, some of those ideas are good ideas and some are bad. It's hard to know which are which. There's been many times when people have brought an idea to me and I've thought, that's not such a good idea. But we've implemented it, and it was a great idea. And no matter how things turn out, we learned as an organization, which is that scientific mindset where there's no failure, there's only learning. Instead of managers being the gatekeepers to innovation, I wanted to provide a framework that would allow anyone in the organization to propose and run an experiment. I call it the STARSHOT framework. And I knew that it needed to provide some rigor so the organization could learn even if things don't go well. But it needed to be lightweight enough that anybody could access it. The STARSHOT is the acronym, and you'll see that in the article. But it also is in contrast to a moonshot. A moonshot is one big goal that could transform the organization if successful, but takes a lot of resources and could be a big distraction as well. So from where I'm standing, there's one big moon and millions of little stars. And so the star shot is the idea of taking a lot of little chances and seeing what works. The framework is outlined in the article, and I would love to know if you use it or if you have any questions or want to discuss it, please contact me. Thank you.
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