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Most companies innovate and approach innovation the way generals approach war. They gather in conference rooms, study market reports, build elaborate strategic plans, and then execute with military precision. The problem? Innovation doesn’t work like warfare. It works like science.
The difference matters more than you think.
A strategist looks at the market, identifies an opportunity, creates a detailed plan, allocates resources, and pushes forward. This works brilliantly when you know where you’re going. But innovation lives in uncertainty. You’re trying to create something that doesn’t exist yet, solve problems people haven’t articulated, or enter markets that aren’t quite real. In this territory, the strategic approach becomes a liability dressed up as wisdom.
Scientists work differently. They probe the darkness with small experiments. They learn from what happens. They adjust. They probe again. This isn’t indecision or lack of vision. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with the unknown.
The Illusion of Knowing
Here’s what strategic planning assumes: that you can know enough upfront to chart the right course. That analysis will reveal the path. That thinking harder will produce better answers.
This works when you’re operating in familiar territory. Building another retail store in a new city? Sure, strategize away. You know what works. The variables are manageable. The outcomes are predictable enough.
But when you’re innovating, you’re necessarily working with incomplete information. The market might not exist yet. Customer needs might be unarticulated or even unconscious. Technology might behave in unexpected ways. Competitors might pivot. Regulations might shift.
In this fog, detailed strategic plans become expensive fiction. They’re convincing because they’re detailed. They feel safe because they’re comprehensive. But they’re based on assumptions that haven’t been tested against reality.
Scientists understand something that strategists often miss: you can’t think your way to truth when the truth hasn’t been established yet. You have to run experiments.
What Probing Actually Means
Probing isn’t about being tentative or uncommitted. It’s about being smart with your ignorance.
When a biologist wants to understand how a cell works, she doesn’t write a comprehensive theory first. She pokes the cell. She removes something. She adds something. She watches what happens. Each intervention is a question posed to reality.
The same logic applies to innovation. You don’t need to know the perfect product before you start. You need to know what question to ask first.
Amazon didn’t begin with a grand vision of becoming everything to everyone. Jeff Bezos started by asking whether people would buy books online. That was the probe. The answer came back positive, which raised new questions. What else would they buy? How fast did they want it? What would they pay for convenience?
Each answer led to the next probe. The strategy emerged from the learning, not the other way around.
This inverts the traditional sequence. Strategy first, execution second becomes probe first, learn second, strategy emerges third.
The Learning Part Is Where Everyone Fails
Most companies think they’re doing probe and learn when they’re actually doing probe and ignore.
They run a pilot program. It produces data. The data conflicts with what leadership wanted to hear. So they explain away the data, adjust the pilot, or simply push forward with the original plan anyway.
This is where the scientific method gets its power, and where most businesses lose theirs. Scientists are ruthless about letting reality overrule their preferences.
If an experiment contradicts your theory, the theory is wrong. Not the experiment. This sounds obvious until you’re the one whose theory is being contradicted, especially if you’ve already told your board that the theory will work.
Real learning requires intellectual honesty that’s uncomfortable. It means admitting you were wrong. It means killing projects you’re excited about. It means telling stakeholders that the plan has changed because reality intervened.
The companies that innovate successfully have figured out how to create cultures where this kind of honesty isn’t just permitted but required. They’ve made it safe to say “the probe failed” without that being career suicide for whoever ran it.
Small Bets Beat Big Plans
The mathematics of uncertainty favor small experiments over large commitments.
If you’re 60% sure about something, and you bet everything on it, you have a 40% chance of catastrophic failure. If you’re 60% sure about ten different things, and you bet small amounts on each, you’ll probably win on six of them and the losses will be manageable.
This is why scientists run multiple experiments in parallel rather than betting everything on one massive study. It’s also why venture capitalists fund portfolios rather than single companies.
But corporate innovation usually works the opposite way. Companies pick one big initiative, staff it heavily, give it a large budget, and then pray it works. When it doesn’t, they declare that innovation is risky and retreat to their core business.
The risk isn’t innovation. The risk is the strategic approach to innovation.
Small probes reduce risk in another way too. They fail faster. A $10,000 experiment that fails in two weeks teaches you something at minimal cost. A $10 million initiative that fails after two years teaches you the same thing at massive cost and with a political catastrophe attached.
Speed of learning matters more than scale of commitment.
When Probing Goes Wrong
The probe and learn approach can malfunction in predictable ways.
The first failure mode is probing without learning. This looks like motion but produces nothing. You run experiment after experiment but never extract the lessons. You’re so busy probing that you never stop to figure out what the probes are telling you.
The second failure mode is learning without deciding. You run experiments, gather data, learn things, and then… run more experiments. Analysis paralysis wearing a scientific costume. At some point, you know enough to make a commitment. The probe and learn approach isn’t about avoiding decisions. It’s about making better informed ones.
The third failure mode is probing for too long on things you could have known faster. If you can answer a question with a survey, you don’t need a product prototype. If you can test an idea in a week, you shouldn’t spend a month planning the perfect test.
The goal is efficient learning, not endless experimentation.
The Pattern Recognition Game
Here’s where probe and learn becomes powerful: pattern recognition across experiments.
Scientists don’t just run isolated experiments. They look for patterns across them. This gene affects that protein. That protein affects this behavior. This behavior correlates with that outcome. The individual experiments are data points. The pattern is the insight.
The same applies to innovation. Your first experiment might show that customers value speed. Your second might reveal they’ll pay more for customization. Your third might demonstrate they hate complexity. Individually, these are interesting. Together, they might reveal that your customers are time stressed professionals who want personalized solutions that just work.
That insight didn’t come from any single probe. It emerged from the pattern.
This is why keeping good records matters. Companies often run experiments and then forget what they learned. Six months later, someone runs essentially the same experiment because nobody documented the first one. This is organizational amnesia masquerading as scientific method.
The learning has to accumulate. Each probe should make you smarter. The questions you ask in experiment ten should be more sophisticated than the questions you asked in experiment one.
Knowing When to Stop Probing
The probe and learn approach eventually has to convert into commitment. You can’t probe forever.
Scientists know this. At some point, you’ve tested enough. The pattern is clear. The theory is validated. You write it up, publish it, and move on to the next question.
In business, the conversion moment is when you scale. You’ve probed enough to know it works. You’ve learned enough to know why it works. You’ve identified the pattern. Now you commit resources and grow it.
The companies that struggle with innovation often struggle with this transition. They either commit too early, before the probes have validated anything, or they probe forever, never quite confident enough to scale.
The trick is recognizing what sufficient evidence looks like. Not perfect evidence. Not absolute certainty. Just enough signal that the risk reward balance has shifted.
This is more art than science, which is ironic given that we’re talking about scientific method. But even scientists make judgment calls about when they’ve tested enough. The difference is they base those judgments on evidence rather than hope.
Why This Feels Wrong to Most Organizations
The probe and learn approach violates several cherished corporate instincts.
It looks indecisive. Leaders are supposed to have vision. They’re supposed to know where they’re going. Probing feels like fumbling around in the dark.
It looks wasteful. You’re running experiments that might fail. You’re spending money to learn you were wrong. Traditional planning promises to avoid this waste by getting it right the first time.
It looks slow. Strategy can be developed in a quarter. Probing takes as long as it takes. You can’t schedule discovery.
All of these instincts are wrong, but they’re deeply embedded. Overcoming them requires cultural change, not just methodological change.
The companies that innovate successfully have leaders who understand that apparent indecision is actually intellectual honesty. That apparent waste is actually efficient learning. That apparent slowness is actually avoiding the much slower failure mode of building the wrong thing.
The Strategist’s Revenge
Here’s the twist: you still need strategy. The probe and learn approach doesn’t eliminate strategic thinking. It relocates it.
Instead of strategy before action, you get strategy after learning. The probes generate data. The data reveals patterns. The patterns inform strategy. The strategy then guides the next round of probes.
It’s a cycle, not a sequence.
Good strategists in this model aren’t the ones who predict the future. They’re the ones who synthesize learning into coherent direction. They spot the patterns others miss. They know when the probes have revealed enough to justify a commitment.
Strategy becomes emergent rather than predetermined. It grows out of contact with reality instead of being imposed on reality.
This is actually more strategic than traditional strategy. You end up with plans that reflect what actually works rather than what you hoped would work.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Innovation is fundamentally about operating in uncertainty. You can either pretend you can eliminate that uncertainty through better planning, or you can develop better ways to operate within it.
The probe and learn approach is uncomfortable because it forces you to admit what you don’t know. It requires you to be wrong in public. It demands that you change your mind based on evidence.
These are features, not bugs.
The strategist tries to eliminate uncertainty upfront. The scientist accepts uncertainty and probes it. One approach feels safer but leads to expensive failures. The other feels riskier but leads to efficient learning.
Most companies say they want innovation while clinging to methods designed for execution. They want the outcomes of probe and learn while maintaining the comfort of strategic planning.
You can’t have both. Innovation requires a different relationship with the unknown. It requires being willing to probe, willing to learn, and willing to let what you learn change everything you thought you knew.
That’s not a bug in the innovation process. That’s the entire point.
The companies that figure this out don’t just innovate better. They build organizational capabilities for continuous learning. They get faster at going from ignorance to insight. They develop what scientists have always had: a method for discovering truth in the face of uncertainty.
The rest keep strategizing their way to irrelevance, wondering why their detailed plans keep failing.
The darkness doesn’t care about your strategy. But it will answer your probes.
