What do Steve Jobs, Frank Gehry, and Chris Rock have in common? According to best-selling author Peter Sims, these diverse luminaries (and many more) all have the same basic creative process.
In his latest book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, Sims explains how creative geniuses across industries use small experiments to lay the groundwork for big successes.
According to Sims, a “little bet” is “a low-risk action taken to discover, develop, and test an idea.” The payoff — or setback — from a single little bet might be inconsequential. But over time, a succession of little bets develops into a powerful leading indicator pointing in the direction of success.
“So, for instance, Chris Rock develops new comedy routines by making little bets with small audiences, while Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos makes small bets to identify opportunities in new markets,” Sims explains. “Little bets are at the center of an approach to get to the right idea described in the book that any of us can learn without getting stymied by perfectionism, risk-aversion, or excessive planning.”
In a recent episode of The Psychology Podcast, Sims met with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, Professor of Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, to discuss in further detail how this iterative approach has been successfully applied across diverse industries.
“Design is inherently experimental and driven by a rapid-prototyping process of trying a lot of things, identifying opportunities, and then narrowing in on those to delve deeper into what will be a more completed idea,” says Sims. “Testing 100 ideas to get to 3 good possibilities to get down to 1 final product is the Apple approach.”
At Pixar, however, the “little bets” approach took on a slightly different form. Sims describes how Pixar uses a “plus-ing” or “yes, and” technique to test and optimize their way to a winning story line and cast of characters.
Throughout the story development process, the Pixar team solicits feedback over and over again from a broad range of demographics. This feedback is continually incorporated into new reels and storyboards, and these iterations continue until they land on the winning story. “Millions of little bets go into the creation of each Pixar film,” says Sims.
Image via http://pixar-animation.weebly.com/storyboard.html
For Kaufman, the concept of little bets resonates with the Darwinian model of creativity put forward by Dean Simonton in his book Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity, whereby a creator narrows down a pool of ideas by selecting those with the best chance to survive, thrive, and propagate.
Why Is The “Little Bets” Concept Important For Marketers?
For marketers, the applications for this test-and-optimize approach are immediate and essential. According to Sims, “little bets must become a way to see what’s around the next corner, lest we stagnate.” For any content marketer trying to be heard amongst the explosion of digital channels, the ability to see around the content corner is a massive competitive advantage.
We’ve written before about the immense potential for marketers to use leading metrics — or metrics that measure initial audience engagement with your content — to refine and optimize content strategies. (For more on how leading metrics can help your content cut through the noise, get your copy of our report, THE CONTENT MARKETING PARADOX.)
Andrew Chen also offers one beatifully simple application of a test-and-optimize approach to content marketing. Chen conducted an experiment using retweets to measure content virality for blog posts.
Chen boils his experiment down to this simple framework:
- Tweet an insight, idea, or quote
- See how many people retweet it
- If it catches, then write a blog post elaborating on the topic
Chen, for example, tested two title options, “New blog post: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing [link]” versus “Growth Hacker is the new VP marketing.” Using Twitter as a real-time feedback loop, Chen found that the latter was the top performer.
That simple “little bet” helped Chen determine the better-performing topic and title to drive traffic to his site. While that single experiment likely drove only a marginally greater return, over time, the aggregate impact of many little bets compounds to much greater content ROI.
Want to learn more? Listen to Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman’s complete interview with Peter Sims on The Psychology Podcast here, or read our interview with Dr. Kaufman about imagination, memory, and the creative process.