The Power of Career Experiments

Anita Brick:

Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to Career Cast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted, actually, way more than delighted to be speaking with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She is an amazing human being, which you will learn over our time together today. She's an award-winning neuroscience and entrepreneur and founder of Nest Labs where her weekly newsletter is read by more than a hundred thousand Curious Minds. Her research at King's College London focuses on psychology and the neuroscience of lifelong learning, curiosity and adaptability. Her book, which is a fabulous read by the way, tiny Experiments, is a transformative guide for living a more experimental life, turning uncertainty into curiosity and carving a path of self-discovery. Before Nest Labs, she worked at Google as an executive on digital health products. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Forbes, the Financial Times Wired and More. That's really an eclectic group of publications and thank you so much for making time for us today.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Thanks so much for having me.

Anita Brick:

There are a lot of things in the book that some people would be like, yeah, that would be nice, but I grew up this way, or I'm in this kind of environment, and the questions from students, alumni, and others who are friends of career cast had some thoughts. Let's start off with actually an MBA student who said, you talk about a child sense of adventure. I think I've lost mine. Where can I start to get it back?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

I love this question. I mean, that's why the book is called Tiny Experiments because you can start tiny. A lot of people think that reconnecting with their sense of curiosity means that they have to overhold their entire life, but that's not the case. You can actually do that by just starting experimenting again, and that can be very small things that you're curious about, so it might be a topic that you want to explore. It might be a different way to go about your morning routine or your evening routine. It might be different way to manage your diet, the way you eat or the way you exercise, even the way you introduce yourself when you start conversations with people you don't know. What I would recommend is observing your own life and asking yourself, is there something I'd be curious to do differently, differently, and then start running tiny experiments?

Anita Brick:

Well, I agree with you and I've done that myself, but I think that what you're asking is a little bit hard if you don't know where to start, and so yes, you can observe and then you go like, well, that's not good enough. That's not big enough. That doesn't align with other things. Let's use something very concrete. I'm working with someone who, because of situation with funding of a startup, he has had a little bit of a rocky time. When entrepreneurial ventures don't get the next round of funding, they sometimes have to cut back. Often they do, and now he's in a situation where he's kind of lost his way and maybe like that first question, his sense of adventure because he is afraid of making what he considers to be another mistake. Where do you start when someone's on shaky ground?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Again, it's a misconception that tiny experiments are about doing big things. I can give you an example. In one case, there was an artist who had a surgery and couldn't paint for a very long time. As a result, you have developed this anxiety that she might not be able to paint again, that she lost her talent, her inspiration and her creativity, and so she felt completely stuck. She designed a tiny experiment where she said, for the next couple of weeks, I'm just going to go and sit in my studio and do nothing, and that's it. I don't have to do anything. I just have to go in my studio and sit there for an hour and that's it. By just doing that, after a little while, she was so bored just sitting and doing nothing in her studio that she picked up her brushes again and she started painting again. The key word here is tiny, and so I always tell people, if you start designing an experiment and it feels overwhelming, it means that it's too big. Go smaller. If it still feels overwhelming, still too big, go smaller until you get to a point where it's so tiny, so easy that there's no resistance anymore, and you almost start feeling excited to give it a try and see what happens.

Anita Brick:

I totally agree with you. I had a situation where a long time ago I was crushed by an elevator and it took me 20 minutes to stand the first time. I love experiments because you're just looking for data. You're looking for data to then do what's next. Sometimes people don't think tiny is important enough. How do you get them to accept tiny is okay.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

When I talk about tiny experiments, I explain to people that it's inspired by the scientific method. A core part of the scientific method is iteration, so the idea is that you test something, you learn from that first experiment and then you iterate. You incorporate what you learned into the next iteration. So what I tell them is that it doesn't matter how tiny, how small you start, because if you feel like there's something interesting here, you can always do it again in a slightly more ambitious way. So I've had people try and experiment for just five days and they loved it and they said, you know what? Actually let me go for two weeks. Now, they still loved it. They went for a couple of months, so that's a way you can scale up your experiment. The flip side of that that is very important to you is that if after running the tiny, tiny, tiny version of it you feel like this is not working, this is not helping, maybe this is adding more pressure, this is more stressful, this is not bringing any charity, then you can stop and run a completely different experiment.

It removes a lot of the pressure.

Anita Brick:

I love it because we have enough pressure in the world. So here's someone who's feeling the pressure and this happens to be a booth alum, and she said, as I am pursuing my goals, a small setback can feel like an anxiety producing disaster. What advice would you have to shift that perspective so I don't get derailed when things don't go my way?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

What this person is talking about in effect is disruptions and disruptions are an inevitable fact of life. How do you respond when a disruption happens? We tend to want to solve the problem straight away, which creates even more anxiety. I always recommend before dealing with the objective consequences of a disruption to first manage the emotional response, and for that there's something called effective labeling. So the way it works is that you're going to name your emotion. Is it that you experience fear of failure? Is it that you're worried you're going to be judged by others because things didn't work as then is it that you now are stressed about your future? So just naming the emotion has been shown to help reduce the impact that it has right now on your mental health. Once you're feeling calmer and your mind is clearer, and then only you can look at the objective consequences, a very simple way to do it is just to go through the consequences like a little cascade.

So you say, this happened, I didn't plan for this. This was very disruptive. What is the consequence? Okay, so now what is the consequence of that consequence and you keep going down. What's interesting is that quite often when you do that, you get to a point where the answer is, so what? Actually nothing else will happen because of this. That's it. This thing happened, it was distrustful, but that's it. We can move on and if not, if there's an actual consequence that needs to be dealt with now that we're a bit calmer, we can actually deal with it.

Anita Brick:

I love that you talk a lot about relationships and community when you are deescalating this. How do relationships and community, how can you get them to be supporters to move through that change of perspective?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

I think a support network is incredibly important in practice. What I have found is that really to build that support network is to show up yourself for others when themselves are in situations of disruption, when they're struggling. People remember when you gave them a hand when they were struggling and they will be there for you in the future when you find yourself in a similar challenging situation.

Anita Brick:

How do you ask for help when you're not used to doing that?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

It's so hard, especially when you grew up in an environment where it wasn't considered a good thing to ask for help and where you were forced to be very independent. This is something you have to practice. This is something I honestly still struggle with myself, and you kind of have to build this muscle at first. You can do it in a very safe small circle. So this is why you see a lot of entrepreneurs create very small masterminds, which is three or five people and they're in a chat group together, and so they can ask for help in a way that is not very public, and then once they build that muscle, once they build that confidence, then they become more comfortable asking for help in wider circles and the people who are the most comfortable asking for help. You'll even see them post on social media and say, Hey, I'm facing this problem. Anyone who can help, but usually don't get from zero to that level of being comfortable asking for help. So I would start with a very small group and maybe just even one friend choosing one friend and saying, that person is going to be my go-to person. If at any point I feel stuck or I feel lost.

Anita Brick:

Well, it sounds like even with community and relationship, we need to run tiny experiments.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Yes.

Anita Brick:

I feel like the world sees all these huge problems and then completely gives up on them, and this is a way to look at what we feel capable of doing to move along. When you were talking about starting with one person and then maybe going to social media in the book you talk about public research or public learning, someone said to me, yeah, well when you do that, won't other people steal your ideas? You take a very different approach to that. So tell us a little bit about that because that can help in the problem solving, whether it is what direction to go in one's career or how to scale a venture.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Ideas have zero value on the execution matters. You're right, and you can only execute on an idea with the help of others. All of the best entrepreneurs, the best researchers, the best teachers, the best, whatever, literally any kind of role in any kind of profession, the best people, the most successful people are the ones who are highly collaborative instead of protecting an idea, which again has zero value, if they're not properly executing on it, I would actually share the idea and I would harness the collective wisdom of the people around you in order to execute on this idea in the best way possible while doing this, you might even find collaborators, actual collaborators to work on that idea together. So that's going to make the journey a lot more fun too in the sense that you're going to get to learn from others but also learn with others.

Anita Brick:

I get that and I am a big fan of that. However, we live in a world that is hyper competitive and it seems like it's even gotten more so how do you help people again run tiny experiments to move from fierce competitor to wonderful collaborator? What are some things to first shift the mindset and then run a tiny experiment that is going to be moving things along without being too scary

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

So you can run your tiny experiments on your own. They work really well as solo experiments, but to learn in public, you're really going to learn faster, learn better, and amplify your impact. People might think when I talk about learning in public that it means that you have to have a huge social media following a big platform where you share your experiments with a bunch of people, not necessarily what I call learning in public is when there is actually one other human being on earth who is aware of the experiment that you're running and who you're sharing your progress with. Just like with the accountability groups, it can start very, very small. So you could even ask just another friend, a fellow student or a colleague and say, Hey, how about we both run an experiment for the next month and then every Sunday let's grab coffee and just do a little check-in together?

That is a form of learning in public. If you're part of a company and you're running experiments, maybe you're interested in a topic, you want to learn more about AI and you want to run some experiments around that. Another way to learn in public is to create a very simple internal newsletter and maybe there are only 20 or three people who are subscribed to it, but every week you share the experiments that you run and what you learned and how other people can benefit from it and learn from it and apply it in their own work. So there are lots of ways to learn in public, and so what I would recommend is whenever you're running a tiny experiment where you would benefit from sharing that knowledge with others, but also others would benefit from you sharing that knowledge, asking yourself, what is a very easy format that I can use where I can learn in public?

Anita Brick:

Let's go back to how do you move someone from viewing another person as a competitor that is probably more than norm in many ways, or even if they are collaborators, there's competitors. How do you move someone's mindset from this is a fierce competition to I'm going to move from competitor to collaborator and it's going to benefit me and the other people involved.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

To be fair, I don't tend to work with a lot of people who have this mindset in the first place tend to work with people who are highly curious and collaborative. People who have this very competitive mindset quite often realize on their own that it's not working. If you want to be successful in today's society, you do have to be curious and collaborative and not highly competitive and obsessed with success at the cost of your relationships with others. Assuming that they're able to change their mind in the first place, I would simply ask them to observe how most successful people are behaving. Even if you look at people that you would describe as highly competitive, you would realize that they are actually collaborating. They have lots of post collaborators and nobody really can make it on their own.

Anita Brick:

I would agree with that. Alright, you talk about collaborator in a different way or in another way in the book as well. You take a very different perspective about procrastination. People who have told me and other people that I know, if you're procrastinating, it means that you have a character flaw or there's something wrong with you. You do not believe that at all. So one of the questions that came in was, okay, how can procrastination become a really great collaborator rather than meeting my enemy?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

You're right that we tend to associate procrastination with a character flow. We basically associate it with laziness. That's not what it is. It is really just a signal from your brain that something is not quite right with the task that you're trying to do and that you would like to do. Instead of pushing through using willpower and very often blaming yourself, which is what we tend to do and procrastinate, what I recommend doing is having an actual conversation with your procrastination. It might sound weird, but bear with me. So the idea is really to first welcome your procrastination and say, oh, hello, you're back. What are you trying to tell me? I'm listening, please tell me what are you trying to communicate to me? And then in the book I share a very simple tool that allows you to have this conversation in a very collaborative way in giving it a bit more structure.

You ask a procrastination, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level you're not fully convinced you should be working on this task. Maybe the task is badly designed, maybe the task is outdated, it was put on your tutor list a while ago, but night doesn't make sense anymore. Or maybe you're not the one who should be completing this task. Maybe someone else should be doing it and they would do it better. Or maybe AI would do a better job and free up some time for you to focus on more creative work. Regardless, at a rational level, your mind is telling you that you should not be working on this task. There is resistance and you procrastinate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level you don't feel like this is going to be fun.

The task is not exciting, and so again, you resist and there's procrastination. And finally, if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills, the right tools or the right support network in order to complete the test. What's great about having this more collaborative type of conversation with your procrastination is that when you systematically ask what's the problem and you truly listen, it also helps you systematically come up with solutions so you can get unstuck. So if the problem is coming from the head, so at a rational level, then you can start rethinking the task. So maybe on your own, figuring out if it's the right approach or if it's something that is part of a group work or something that you are doing with the team, you can go to them and say, Hey, I've been procrastinating on this because I'm not fully convinced this is the right approach.

Can we brainstorm? Can we go back to the drawing board and figure it out together? If the problem was coming from the heart, then make it fun, make it exciting, make it enjoyable. Go to your favorite coffee shop or grab a friend that you love to work with and do a little coworking session and if the problem is coming from the hand, then raise that hand. Ask for help. That could look like coaching, mentoring or watching a tutorial, but really making sure you have access to the right tools and the right skills in order to complete the task. And all of a sudden instead of feeling stuck and blaming yourself, you have a solution to move forward.

Anita Brick:

I love that because procrastination can create an impasse and if it creates an impasse that's not good. We know that and we want to move forward at whatever pace we're ready in whatever way we are. So I like the way you broke that down. Alright, here's someone who likes the idea of tiny experiments and he said, thank you for writing the book. I am super curious. The challenge for me is that I have so many experiments going on simultaneously that some never get completed. Do you have any thoughts on how to increase my number of completions and so I can take my results into the next phase of another experiment?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

I love this question because there is such a thing as being too curious sometimes and it makes it really hard to manage. First. I completely understand that this is actually a very common challenge, especially for people who are highly curious. I really recommend, I know it's going to be hard. Again, if you're someone who's really curious to really recommend only running one experiment at a time, the reason why is first because as this person has noticed, if you have too many experiments running at the same time, it's going to be really hard to complete them. It can feel really overwhelming. The other reason is just like in proper scientific experiments, if you're playing with too many variables at the same time, it's really hard to know what's actually having an impact. You want to only tweak one thing at a time so you can see if this is having an impact, maybe on your productivity, on your communication skills and your mental health or whatever it is that you're trying to play with here.

So that's another reason I tell people who really want to run more than one experiment that there is one exception if really you insist. I would say you can run up to two experiments at the same time, but only if they are in completely different areas of your life. For example, you might want to run an experiment with the way you run your weekly team meetings. That's one thing. And then maybe you run another experiment with meal prep. They're so separate that they probably don't have an impact each other and that's okay. You can do that for the rest. I would do one experiment at a time and I personally like to think what I call a curiosity inbox. It is just a note on my phone where I write all of my ideas for a tiny experiments. It almost feels like a candy jarring. When I feel curious and excited to run an experiment, I can open it and see if there's something in there that I would like to experiment with.

Anita Brick:

I like that toward the end of the book, you talk about closing the loop, the way you talk about that kind of completion is very powerful. Can you share how you close the loop when you have finished or you're at the point where it's time to complete the tiny experiment?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Absolutely. It's very easy to just go in circles if you keep on repeating the same thing over and over again without making any space for self perfection. So closing the loop has several aspects to it. The first one is just closing the loop yourself on your own, making sure that you reflect on what you learned. I love a tool called plus minus. Next, where you first list in the first column, everything that went well in the second column minus everything that didn't go so well, and in the last column. Next, what you want to try next. And in terms of what you can do next, you can either keep going with the experiment the same way you've been doing it, which is completely fine. If it's been working for you, this is great. You can tweak it. I call it pivot, which means that you might want to change the parameters a little bit.

Maybe you've been conducting your experiment in the morning and you want to try to see if it's better in the evening. You can decide to scale it up or scale it down or again, completely valid. You can pause, you can stop for now if this doesn't feel aligned with your current aspiration. So this is one way to close the loop is just making sure that first you reflect on what you learned and second, you make a decision as to what you're going to do next. Another way to close the loop, especially if you've been learning in public, is to close the loop with your collaborators. So really just taking the time to let them know that you're done with the experiment and sharing what you learned. That can be as simple as a quick email saying, Hey, I'm done. This is what I learned and this is what I'm going to do next. Or if it was a bit of a maybe more ambitious experiment, actually having a little debriefing meeting together where you can actually share your results and where they can ask any questions.

Anita Brick:

I like that because when people collaborate with us, they want to know that what they did and the contributions they made were actually valuable and valued. So I love that as a way to create that closure or closing the loop. So here's a very different question. Someone is asking for a very specific use case for tiny experiments, and this is an alum, and he said, part of me feels embarrassed to even ask you these questions. I want to create a captivating story. The next phase of my life, I want it as you would put it, I want it to be a real page turner, a story that inspires many. I don't know where to start, but I'm a ready pupil.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Such a beautiful question. What is the main characteristic of a page turner? It's that you don't know what's going to happen next. So I think the very first part is embracing the uncertainty of your path. What you want is not to write this story in advance. What you want is in three or five years look back and be almost completely baffled, not really feeling like there was no way you could have predicted that that's where you would end up. Number one, don't try to write it in advance. Number two, stay as open as possible to new opportunities, and especially the ones that don't necessarily feel like they're aligned with what you've been doing before. Some of the best opportunities don't necessarily seem like they would make sense on a very linear cv. What you should follow instead is your own sense of curiosity and excitement. Follow your curiosity and really use it as a compass. Whenever you have an opportunity for collaboration, a project that you could work on, and even if you can't quite express why you notice that you feel really excited, really curious, go for it. Make space for it. Let your path emerge by going through all of those different experiences that again, in the moment might not make sense and only have one thing in common that you're curious and excited about them. This is how you write a page turner.

Anita Brick:

That's great. So going along with that, another Boothy said like you, I too crave creativity and connection. How do you recommend finding like-minded people who are open to sharing this dream and support each other?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

We're so lucky to have the internet. There are so many great communities that you can join first, any kind of alumni association that you might be a part of, most of them have smaller groups around the topics of interests that might be aligned with your own interests. That one area where you can look. There are also lots of communities of practice online that you can find. I have my own Nest Labs community where anyone can run their own tiny experiments post their progress, and then everybody's encouraging each other, providing tips and feedback. That's one community, but I've seen so many different ones. You can also go on different subreddits. Parts of Reddit are not necessarily that welcoming, but others are very welcoming. I would start with online communities and then try to focus on the ones that also have an offline components so you can then start creating those connections in the real world. So that's the way I would approach it.

Anita Brick:

Great. Do you have time for one more question?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

I do.

Anita Brick:

Okay, great. Thank you. So here we go. You've given us a lot of really good advice. You clearly have a very strong point of view that is very empowering. If you are advising someone in creating a tiny experiment in challenging times, what are three things that they could begin doing right now?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Number one, designing an experiment always, always starts with observations. Instead of designing the first experiment that comes to mind, spend a little bit of time observing your own life. I like to call this self anthropology because it's really pretending that you're an anthropologist, but with your own life as your topic of study. And so without any kind of self-judgment or preconceptions or assumptions, just look at your life and ask yourself, what do I want more of? What do I want less of? What gives me energy? What drains my energy? And based on that, based on those observations, now that you know how things are, you can start imagining how things could be different. And this is really how you tense the seed a hypothesis for a tiny experiment. Number two, I know I have insisted a lot on this, but again, as the title of the book, so I'm going to insist again, keep it tiny. If you're hesitating in between two durations in between two months and two weeks go for two weeks, you're hesitating between five weeks and five days go for five days. Number three, just iterate. Iterate in the way you approach it right on your own and maybe then iterate by doing it with others, iterate with the way you approach it, with the way you reflect. Really, the idea of having an experimental mindset is to not copy paste what has been working for other people. It's to create your own definition of success through personal experimentation.

Anita Brick:

I love it. Anything I didn't ask you that you wanted me to?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

No, I absolutely loved your questions and the questions people shared. That was fantastic.

Anita Brick:

Awesome. I love the book. I'm so glad someone shared it with me and I'm glad that you had time and keep running tiny experiments because it gives, and I'm saying this to everyone who's listening because it moves us forward, it gives us hope, and it actually encourages others. So thank you for choosing your path. I know that originally when you left Google, your mom wasn't really so on board with that. I'm sure she's extremely proud of you today.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

Anita Brick:

Well, thanks again and thanks for making the time for us, and I hope that our paths crossed again. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with Career Cast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.