Poke it!

This ties back to fundamentals of how learning happens, how you need to design a dynamic product that can live in the tension of supporting experiments you team wants to perform and at the same time support you customers achieving their goals while gathering their feedback. What is a reasonable strategy for doing that?

For a strategy to be called intuitive it should be one that children are using. For a strategy to be meaningful it needs to have good chances to produce good results more often than not. As it turns out there is such a strategy and it can be summarized in two words: Poke it!

Anyone familiar with children knows that if you put something new in front of a child they will poke it to see what happens. This comes from the intuitive understanding that for things you don't fully understand you need to interact with them to get more information of how they work and behave.

For persons working in complex environments where people and systems interact on a large scale there should be no illusion that things can simply by analyzed and understood. This is not a limitation of your mental abilities, the smartest people I've met are humble with things they don't understand, it's a result of the context in which you operate.

The next time you hesitate, stop analyzing and just poke it!

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