Provocations for the Future

Establish a System

Experimentation practice is made up of several parts which need attention:

• The evaluative process of understanding existing or potential impact

• The generative task-based process of experimentation design and review

• The ongoing process of documentation, referencing and collaboration around insights and data.

To this end, we need to recognise that experimentation practice can generate large volumes of qualitative and quantitative data, insights and decision documentation.

The challenge soon becomes how to store, manage, and activate this over time. It’s no small challenge, but without this, the only vehicle for that knowledge is the people in an organisation, old project reports and our incomplete memories (which are deeply susceptible to bias).

We did not focus on this last part at Monash, whilst we were seeing what it would take to seed experimentation practice in the Research Labs. However, in my work on experimentation in the past, and my ongoing efforts in this space, I have explored this area.

Previous Exploration of Solutions

• Trello to create open repo as per my original article. We found this doesn’t scale well.

• Research repositories are something the ResearchOps community is actively talking about on a .

• Suggestions from ReOps have been made for products like:

  • All-in-one Research suites: Dovetail, EnjoyHQ, Aurelius.

  • Customise-your-own: Airtable (Polaris Template), Notion, Nuclino.

• Essentially, the discussion keeps revolving around the theme of choosing the platform that works best for your challenge.

• I believe looking for what works in other fields may also be useful, where products like Findings may provide fruitful for some contexts.

• The knowledge management industry is also working in this space, and equipped with AI, is becoming more active in finding ways to surface the right information at the right time, for the right people.

Collaborative Experimentation

As mentioned in the Introduction,

Change the way you conduct meetings by starting with last week’s experiments.

• Write research experiments and engage with other disciplines to explore how they would approach the same question.

• Activate learnings by giving people a ‘primary research repo’ to investigate before, during and after research activities.

Something Else

• Other theme based on research.