Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

Not Quite Experiment,

Not Quite Discovery

Business researchers have noted the advantages of cheap

and rapid experimentation in situations that call for discovery

or improvement, or are characterized by high uncertainty.

3

But rehearsals at People’s Light are not experiments—not

exactly—nor were the exploratory forays into Web use at Sun

experiments—not exactly.

In rehearsal at People’s Light and in new technology ex-

ploration at Sun, trying “so many different ways” isn’t

experimentation because these activities deliberately violate

precepts of sound experimentation. For example, they don’t

predefine the range of possibilities to be tried. Indeed, the ...