I can say this because I was trained as one: scientists are geeks. They are lousy team players and most have as much business sense as a test tube. But they have figured out something that businesses can benefit from. It’s widely misunderstood but extremely powerful: the scientific method.
Science is all about testing hypotheses: statements about how we believe the world works. But rather than conducting experiments to support their hypotheses, scientists actually spend all of their time trying to prove that they’re wrong. And it’s actually very difficult to design experiments capable of revealing critical flaws.
Knowledge is simply what’s left when we run out of ways to disprove our ideas.
What can businesses learn from the scientific method? Finding evidence to support our intuition can be easy but is not very useful. Instead we should be listening to the nay-sayers, the contrarians, and uncovering every alternative and option.
Great ideas, processes and products are often not those we have reasons to love, but those we fail to have reasons to hate.