Experimentation

Chapter: Expand Your Experimental and Scientific Mind

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
-Albert Einstein, scientist

Evening is a time of real experimentation. You never want to look the same way.
-Donna Karan, fashion designer

You may be wondering why the topics of science and experimentation appears in a book on creativity.Most people fear science and view it as far away from creative activity as possible.  In reality, science is one of the most creative endeavors of the human mind.Your scientific mind helps you to understand the natural world and by doing so, you attain many valuable skills. To understand the nature of the world that we inhabit, we begin with observation. Truly observing the world is a skill in of itself. From those observations we develop mental models of the world based on notions of association, causality, inference, etc.

The formation of mental models allows us to exercise our imagination. Those mental models must be subjected to tests to determine their efficacy. We do this via experiments. Experimentation is the cornerstone of science. The history of science is a history of great thinkers and the models they developed, tested, and either clung to or reformulated.

Your scientific mind teaches you to be nimble, flexible, rigorous, structured, imaginative, and tenacious. You also learn to defend your ideas verbally and in print. Science is not for the faint of heart.  It takes guts to defend your mental models and to convince others of their efficacy. After all, we are talking about models that pertain to the nature of reality.

In this chapter we explore mental models, scientific methods, experimentation, and action learning and identify ways to apply those skills to our personal and business lives.

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