Why I Love the Squiggle of Experimentation

I’m going to interrupt my regular weekly broadcast of laying out the steps in The Art of Getting Unstuck and instead offer an underlying framework. It's the accumulation of wisdom from dozens of projects that I worked on as a design leader, at IDEO and beyond.

More importantly, it is the WHY behind the core steps of the programs I’ve built, and knowing this will help you to make the most of what I offer next.

This framework shows the steps that people take for successful change: They start with a Trigger (often prompted by a Decision, a Derivation, or a Desire), then they start Batting Around a few things.

Rarely do those things work.

A framework for making the change we want in life, Amy Bonsall, 2024

But here’s where the pure gold comes: If they don’t succumb to “meh, I give up,” successful changemakers tend to go through the Squiggle of Experimentation. Guys, the Squiggle of Experimentation is MAGIC. It’s a game changer every time. Experimenting is the act of being hypothesis-driven and curiosity-minded about things you're trying to make happen, and the Squiggle of Experimentation is a period of many small, easy experiments happening in quick succession. In other words, you try a whole bunch of things, not getting precious about any of them, but instead getting curious about what’s sticking.

It’s only by passing through the Squiggle of Experimentation that people tend to rise to the last couple of steps, Flow (where change is embedded) and Evolution (where it is refined based on life’s changing circumstances).

This framework came out of years of behavior change work, where I worked with the world’s leading brands on helping them uncover and design solutions for people’s needs. On project after project, I began to see a pattern: when we were prompting any sort of change in behavior, it worked when people had some autonomy over what that change looked like and how they got there. It failed when the path was prescribed, even if many others had succeeded with that very path in the past. In short: when people experimented, they made the changes they craved, and and when they followed a predetermined path, they often failed. What a relief, eh? As it turns out, doing it your way is the right way, as long as you take an experimenter’s lens. (This article could alternatively have been titled: why I don’t believe that waking up at 5am and taking a cold plunge is the only way to business success. 🤣)

So that’s the why: the Squiggle of Experimentation is where the magic happens, where people go from having a desire for change to the experience of change.

Next week I’ll get into what an experiment is and how to experiment, and I get both giddy and pedantic about this topic, so I’m excited to see you then!