 So, at least, okay, I have three hands, that's good. But when you raise the three guys who raise their hands, as in you don't want to do it ever or sometimes because you said sometimes, sometimes when there's a lot of delivery pressure, you don't want to experiment, yeah, okay. Even with legal requirements, okay, compliance, okay. I'm quickly going to just glimpse through various different experiments that have happened in the lifetime of humans and how that affects you. And then I'm going to ask this question again and probably it's going to change. And all I want you to, so that you guys wake up a little and pay attention, I want you to see what is there on the slide and then probably call out what it is, okay. Starting with, come on, louder. Wheel, good, you'll have to be here, this is not working. What's this? Well, irrigation, okay, that's a tricky one. Okay, what's this? Lighthouse, before the light bulbs, okay, just a lighthouse. What's this? Compass, yeah, magnetic compass. What's this? The steam engine, the steam engine, all right. What's this? Windmill, slightly newer version, not the older ones. Netherlands, yes, windmill. What's this? Fireworks, fireworks, yeah. Good, you didn't look at the old man, it's a clock, it's a watch, okay. What's this? Well, toilets, actually, toilets, that was an invention, toilets. Sorry? It's a signboard, yeah, a signboard as well, cool. What's this? This, yeah, so this is me in, have you heard of Gutenberg? Gutenberg, the person who invented the printing press? He has, there's a museum, the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany. So this is me with the refurbished original printing press from Gutenberg. And to be honest, everything that we have seen so far, we have not even entered the 16th century, okay. This is all before the 16th century. That's the power of experimentation that we're talking about. So when we say that experiments work or they do not work, and if you do not have time, and let's say for some reason you don't do it, you're missing out on quite a lot that might have happened after the 16th century, hopefully. So the question for you is, do you experiment at work? And if you do, please raise your hands. You do experiment at work, great. Do you really do or you just think you do? At least you think you do. So that's one of the intent of this talk, validate your assumptions, okay? Because we believe that experiments are good. We also believe that we do experiment at work. Just verify your assumptions. That's all that experimentation is all about. With me so far, great. So before we actually go into slice, there are a few things that have to be clarified. One, you will have to understand what is experiment, what are experiments, what's experimentation, and what's a mindset. Because the talk basically says experimentation mindset. So I'm just going to give you Google definitions of all of these, okay? This is not something that I have made up. Experiment. It's a scientific procedure undertaken to make discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact. Simple? That's an experiment. Experimentation is the act of performing experiments. So it's what you do in order to experiment. What's important is the mindset. The mindset, and we all speak about mindsets. Mindset is a set of attitudes that you have in order to perform certain aspects of life. So experiment, experimentation, mindset, cool? All right, so let's go to slice. Now, I must confess. The first time I did this talk, I called it the slice framework. In fact, just because I added the word framework, it was so attractive that I had a full house. It was like 80 people in a space of 30 people. It just crammed up because we wanted to learn a framework. It's not. Okay, so if you asked me before I started the session, am I going to give you a framework for experimentation? No. What slice is, it's five steps needed in order to run successful experiments. All right, just five steps. So when I submitted this paper, even Tathagat, who's the track lead, he actually asked me, so how is slice different? Why slice? I mean, how is it different than the scientific method? And the scientific method has been around since the 17th century. We saw the invention before the 16th century. This is the 17th century scientific method came in, and it's been around ever since. Then why slice? Does it add anything different? So there are two aspects, two areas of focus when it comes to slice. Let's be very clear. It's not new. It's old wine in a new bottle. Look on the bright side. It's a new bottle. Okay, and new bottles are new ways of doing things. That's innovation. When we had cars which replaced horses, the end result was still the same, to go from point A to point B. The method of reaching changed. That's innovation. That's the same thing that slice was to address. And there are two major areas that it addresses. First of all, it simplifies the experimentation definition at least. Right? How does it simplify? So a lot of organizations, so you said that if there's not enough time, we don't do it. The another way of putting it would be that sometimes you feel it's so complex that we don't want to do it, or we don't have the time or the skills to do it. So the objective of slice is to simplify it so that anyone can do it. It's so easy. And the second is to actually spell out the mindset that is required for running successful experiments. So what kind of attitudes do you really need as individuals if you want to run successful experiments? That's slice. And we'll address both of these. Okay? So firstly, what is slice? I said it's series of five steps, so let's take a look at five steps. It's select, learn, implement, chronicle, and expand. Select, learn, implement, chronicle, expand. Any words in that that you don't understand? Chronicle, chronicle. All right, going back to Google. Let's first address hypothesis because I said that in one of the earlier slides, and if you do not understand what hypothesis is, it's basically an idea that you want to test. It's a starting point. So when I say select in slice, you're selecting a hypothesis that you want to run with. All right, that's a select. So select a hypothesis. Chronicle, you asked me what's chronicle. Chronicle is factual writing account of important historical events, blah, blah, blah. That's a noun form. I don't want you to look at that. Look at the verb, the second sentence in this definition. It says record factual details in some way. So there's a synonym over there that also says document. And I could have very easily said document. Instead of slice, it would be slide. It's still fine. The moment I said document, the first thing that comes to your mind is MS word. Wonderful. Probably one of the good things that Microsoft built. So it's document in any format. Even me speaking over here is form of documentation. It's as long as you can propagate the information to someone in some form. That's why deliberately not having document over there but calling it chronicle. Just record whatever has been done so that you can pass it on. Okay? So going back to slice, it's select, learn, implement, chronicle, expand. I'll just quickly tell you what it means. You select a hypothesis that you want to test. Or you believe that if you do something, it might result in something better. You have no idea if that will ever happen. You learn more about it in order to implement something. I'll give you an example also after this one. So you learn more about the hypothesis so that you can implement in certain way. Followed by chronicle, that's the documentation aspect. Whatever results come out of the implementation, you have to go ahead and create a chronicle out of it. And then you have to expand. And expand basically means either do it again and again and again. So repeat it or provide it to the rest of the world so that someone else can repeat it. Make sense? So select, learn, implement, chronicle, expand. Does that simplify it? At least a little bit? Okay, let's give you an example. Can mass support life as we know? We don't know. The hypothesis is probably it can because there are similarities with the composition. So you select that hypothesis, you learn more about it. So you learn more about it by doing certain kind of small experiments or you send some spacecraft to the planet. You send a rover, you get some information, you get results. That's the implementation part of it. Once you get all of this, you're going to chronicle. All the results are going to be in some form. And then it's going to expand. I mean NASA sent a rover. Was there any reason why ISRO also send a spacecraft after that? That's the expansion. You want it to repeat multiple times so that any kind of changes or any differences can be captured. That's the expand. So that's slice. It's still scientific method, but it's maybe simpler so that you can implement in your organizations. You do this with products also. When you develop a new product, you do this a lot. There is an idea that this product might change the world. So you learn more about it. So you do user research. How many of you do user research? Please raise your hands. User research. You collect a lot of information about what kind of users you have, and then you implement something. At this point of time, many organizations stop. But if you miss out on the CNE, where after the implementation, you actually have to get the results back and then expand so that others can repeat and recreate the same results or different results, then you're missing out on the scientific aspect, the experimentation aspect. So this is immutable. When you say slice, running experiments, S-L-I-C-E, you can't skip any. It has to be all. If so far, everything is clear about slice, then we can move ahead. All good? If I just give this away to you right now, can you still go and run experiments? Because it's just select, learn, implement, chronicle, expand. You have to go and do some slices in your organizations. But I'll also give away a few attitudes that you need to carry so that you can do it in a much better way. So attitudes. Now, slice gets divided into two aspects. You simplify it. So we simplified it by calling it slice and making it simple so that you can digest it. Now, the definition of mindset is big. There are loads of attitudes that you need in order to run successful experiments. In the interest of time, you're going to discuss three. And then I'm here for the rest of the week. Catch hold of me and ask as many questions as you want. So we look at three. The first one is learn to fail. Learn to fail. I'm not talking about learning from failures. I'm talking about learning to fail. I did say that slice is a way of running successful experiments. That does not mean that your results will always lead to something successful. Most of the times you will fail. I'm really saying most of the times. And if you're not okay with that or organizations where failure is not acceptable, this becomes slightly difficult to manage. But if you have that attitude as an individual as well, that's a great start. Just learn to fail. You fail, that's fine. You try it again because you have to repeat. You have to recreate the result. One time failure does not mean that the experiment does not work. One time success also does not mean that it works. It has to be repeated multiple times. That's the expansion part. So you need to learn to fail. So you have to replicate it as many times as possible with as many different contexts as possible and keep on doing it so that at least you are sure of a few instances where things may or may not work. But what do you do about this point? When failure is not an option, then you go and speak to your leadership. It's that simple. Or hire a coach. We speak about creating a safe environment. Safe environment is basically a space where you're allowed to do unsafe work. That's the basis of learning to fail. So we have heard about safe environment again and again. And if you have heard of modern agile, anyone? So it has two aspects of it. It has experimentation. It has safe environment. You need to create an environment to team an organization where people are allowed to fail. Rather, that's an expectation. You are supposed to be vulnerable. If that happens, then it leads to something we call as innovation. Heard of it? Because you are trying out different ways of doing the same things. So you're basically improving as you go along. That's innovation. But you do have to add a tolerance limit. It's not one. It cannot be one. If you run it once and if it fails and you stop doing it, that's not experimentation. So if you raise your hand initially saying that you do experiment at work, but you do it only once to check if it works or not, yeah, that's a good starting point for an experimentation. You have not gone beyond that point yet. Add a tolerance limit. If you believe that this particular experiment can have a good result that gives you a value of 100 units, for example. Create small experiments that may cost 10 units. Even if you fail, say, six times, you have spent 60 units. But if you succeed on the seventh time, you still get the value of 100 units. I'm saying it units because you can determine what is it that you can define as units. It can be time, it can be cost or something else. Once you have reached a point where the benefits are basically not outweighing the cost, stop or try something different. But until that time, expand. This works for both products and processes. You can do this with products. You can do it with processes. That's the reason why we have so many startups and most of the startups fail. Does that mean that we stop having startups? No. How many of you read business books? So we had a coaching camp on Sunday and someone said at that time that if there was only one way of succeeding, there would be only one business book. That's not the case. So you have to keep on repeating this experiment over and over again. That's learning to fail. If you have learned to fail, the second thing that you need to remember is don't hate what you don't understand. Don't hate what you don't understand. Two years back, I was attending a conference back in Pune. And there was a speaker who was criticizing safe a lot. Safe. The scale agile framework. All right. So he's criticizing it a lot. And there was one person in the audience who asked a question that, hey, if it's so bad, what does everyone want to do it? It was the speaker said, secret smoking is injurious to health. There are two things that might happen with that answer. Either the person who asked the question stops pursuing safe or still implements it because the organization wants it, but with a half heart. From my perspective, I have a knowledge of safe that is called zero. I have not read about it. I have not received the training. I might have implemented bits and pieces of it, but I do not know what you call the terms. In that case, do I have the liberty of hating something that I don't understand? Yeah. Logically, no. So let me go through a few sentences and let's see if you can relate to this with your organizations and your teams. This is how we do it here. It's our best practice. Heard of it? But if you continue doing your best practices all the time, how would you know something better has not come along? If it ain't broken, don't fix it. It's working. How many of you drive cars? Cars, you do. You have maintenance. You take your cars for servicing. If you don't take your vehicles for servicing and after a few years, if something bad happens to your vehicle, is the cost bigger than annual maintenance or less? Well, you can't be for sure. It's just a hypothesis. But the idea is that maybe the cost will be much higher. But if you're not doing frequent maintenance, there's a chance of a bigger cost to pay. So why shouldn't you fix something that ain't broken? That's theory. How practical is it? I've heard this a number of times. So I train people on multiple things and they say, Vishal, that looks good in the books. It's good on the slide. It's good theory. Does it work in practice? How practical is it? And we spoke about books, right? So people write books and books are nothing but theory. But people, when they write books, they are writing their own experiences in the book. They're not using the autocorrect function to create long text. It's their experience. So it's just as practical as it was for them when they did it. Now it's your choice if you want to take it or leave it. If you do leave it, these are basically smaller variations of hating what you don't understand. If you haven't tried it out, how would you know it works or it does not? We speak about Kaizen. We speak about continuous integration. How many of you have retrospectives? Raise your hands. You do the what went well, what did not go well, and you have action items. How many of you captured action items for the things that are working well? Change things which are working well. I see two hands in the room. Three, change things which are working well. Continuous improvement never said that you have to only improve the things which are not working well. Innovation comes from frequently checking. Even if it's working well, can we do it differently? When you try something else, maybe it does not work for you, but you'll still go ahead and tell it to the other teams. Why don't you try it out? It didn't work for us. Maybe it'll work for you. That's expansion. Don't hate what you don't understand. Smaller variations of the entire thing. The third one and probably something that is one of the biggest topic, and someone asked me if I can teach you a method of it. One of the ways of running experiments is thought experiments. Third of it. This is a way of experimenting where you don't really implement it. You just think out loud of all the possibilities that can happen. Some of the very big thought experiments which are there in the world includes theory of relativity, uncertainty principle, quantum entanglement, loads of it. Showering is cat. I don't think he actually killed a cat. The idea is that you take a hypothesis, you think of it as a theory of relativity. You think everything that can happen around that particular hypothesis. So that's a learning and implementation is just on a whiteboard, for example. Document everything and either you expand on it by implementing it at some time in the future or give it to someone else so that they can expand on it. Sometimes we deliberately do not do it, and sometimes we don't do it because there are constraints because of which we cannot do it. We have cars and cars pollute. That's the reason why we want to move away from fossil fuels. So let's say we have electric cars. But when you have electric cars, there will still be a lot of cars and not everyone can afford it. What else can you do? Another hypothesis would be, why don't we go back to horses? That will still reduce the pollution. You'll probably have a lot of horse poop on the road. But reduce pollution. Let's take the third aspect. Why or what if all the organizations in the world, at least in a region, make working from home compulsory? That's our hypothesis. If people stop commuting, can that reduce pollution? Let me learn more about it. So I'll learn how many people actually use vehicles for commuting, how much pollution does it generate, how much time will it take if everyone stops commuting, let's say in a region called Delhi, and how much time will it take for Delhi to get back to breathable air quality index? Take all of that as a chronicle, give it to Irvin Kejrival for expansion. That's a thought experiment. It's cost effective, it gives a lot of value, and you can go ahead with it. All you need is a whiteboard and some time in hand. There was one thought experiment that I did put up in front of the folks who attended the coaching camp. And it's basically that every organization wants to transform. So we get in coaches. And what coaches do is, they try to make sure that the organization lives for a slightly longer period of time. Think of a thought experiment. If all the coaches stop doing what they do, probably these companies will go out of business much quicker. And then all the rest of the companies who survive will be good places to work for all of you. The thing about thought experiments is it makes you think. Hopefully these past 20 minutes also made you think a little bit. Just a quick recap. So slide stands for select, learn, implement, chronicle, expand. Three attitudes that we saw. Learn to fail. Don't hate what you don't understand and thought experiments. That's just a giveaway of a small variation of the experimentation mindset. My name is Vishal Prasad and thank you very much. Thank you. We have time for questions? No. Okay. We don't have time for questions but I'll meet you over here.