InnerVentures

Success Hacking takes a very experimental and evidence based approach to achieving outcomes. Target. Do. Observe. Learn.

Many of the activities I have pursued in my life were conducted in this spirit. I’ve tried to capture them as portfolio projects. Some were not successful per se but the learning in every case was. Which I then took on to my next project.

Success Hacking can be applied to any pursuit. It can be organisationally or business focused. Or you can apply it at an individual level too as I do – my Dharma Hacker post post explains this. As Herbert Otto said,

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.”

From an organisational and business point of view, the world around us has become very complex and is constantly in flux. The only constant is change and the only certainty is uncertainty.

Data is in abundance. In itself, it is only a contributor to complexity. Deriving meaning from it though purposeful experiments is where opportunity lies. These days, as software eats the world, the opportunity to build applications, services and experiences lie everywhere. So too the possibility to collect and understand the data behind them.

The success hacker learns by doing and observing outcomes (and reading the data “tea leaves”), progressing quickly with what works, discarding what doesn’t. They don’t believe in elaborate plans, seeing experimentation as the new planning.

The success hacker is the chief experimenter, sensemaker and intrapreneur in your organisation. Nurture them.

Organisations can and should attend to some basic needs but to succeed going forward they need to become engines of possibility. Creativity and innovation are excellent aspirations for the modern organisation to actualise around. Also for the Success Hacker. In other words, the outcomes we strive for should aim to create new possibilities, new innovations. More on that here: The Modern Organisation’s Hierarchy of Needs.

An obvious outlet for this type of approach is in my professional role as a customer success manager. Indeed they are deeply intertwined. I’m writing about Customer Success in a new eBook / trend report you can find out more about in this post: Customer experience, the subscription economy and 10 ways success teams will make you win

You will probably see this approach in everything I do but as linked to earlier, particularly in my portfolio projects.