[Sound: People clapping.] [Visual: A woman walks onto a stage in front of an audience. A screen behind her displays the reMarkable logo.] [Visual: On-screen text reads: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Neuroscientist, Founder & CEO Ness Labs.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: There's an interesting paradox about knowledge work. Knowledge workers are hired for their ability to think creatively, to solve problems, to navigate uncertainty. They're very, very good at doing their job. They're very productive, very effective. Give them a problem and they'll get to it and find a solution. On the other hand, a lot of knowledge workers are burnt out and overwhelmed. So why is it that so many smart people torture themselves in this way when it comes to the way they manage their own work and their workflows? In order to understand this paradox, we need to go back to the very definition of success. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes to the word “success” in quotes.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Success. This is something we all want. We chase it, we praise it, we admire it. We spend a lot of time measuring it. You have OKRs, KPIs, performance reviews, and very often you measure your own success based on the success of others. It's as if we were all staring at this giant leaderboard, always asking who's doing better, faster, more effective work. So what is success? What is this success we're so obsessed with as a society? If you open a dictionary, the most likely definition of success you're going to find is something like that. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: “success” noun. reaching a desired outcome.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Reaching a desired outcome. Now, I'm a scientist, so please bear with me as we break down this definition together. So we can understand what is this definition of success? What is the success we all want and we have agreed on as a society? So reaching a desired outcome. First, reaching. There's the idea of movement towards what? Something we desire, something we feel would be good if we got it. And what is that something? An outcome. Which implies that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision of your destination, of where you want to go. This definition is so simple, and again, we've all agreed on it as a society that you might feel like there's no reason to question it. But this definition of success is actually based on something called linear goals. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: linear goals, with an arrow pointing right.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Linear goals are based on the assumption that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan. Once you have that, once you have front-loaded your thinking and the strategy, then you just need to work hard, work really, really hard, and you'll get there. Linear goals, when you start looking for them around you, are everywhere. Depending on the country where you're living, you might have a three, four, or five year university degree. Then that's going to be followed by a first five years of your job. You all know this question. You're being asked. I hate this question. Where do you see yourself in five years? You're supposed to have this vision of what's going to happen. Very linear thinking. And then another definition of success in a lot of countries is maybe becoming a homeowner. So you have a mortgage, and that again is very linear. Getting the mortgage and repaying it over a number of years. Linear goals are absolutely everywhere and in a lot of societies have become a foundation of how we relate to success. There's only one problem with linear goals. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It shows a collage of city signs and street art. A squiggly line is drawn on the right. Text reads: We live in a nonlinear world.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: We live in a nonlinear world. There are market trends that keep on shifting all the time, new technologies that can disrupt an entire industry, and global events that can change everything overnight. In that nonlinear world, trying to cling to your linear goal is only going to lead to overwhelm and burnout. You're trying to go from point A to point B to point C in that order, feeling like if only you have the right vision and you work really hard, you will be successful. But in reality, we all know how our everyday work and life feels like. We are in this complex web full of twists and turns with uncertainty at every crossroad. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: Scientists have a different mindset.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: You know who has a completely different definition of success? Scientists. For scientists, success is not getting to a specific destination. Success is learning something new. As long as they've discovered something they didn't know before the experiment, that is success. And they're able to look at any result, any outcome without any self-blame or self-judgment. And today, I would like you to start imagining what your life and work would look like if you started treating it like a giant laboratory. If, instead of approaching challenges with this need for control and linear goals, you approach challenges with curiosity and how everything would change in your work culture and your personal life if you developed what I call an experimental mindset. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: failure = learning.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: So, going back to scientists, you know when they have an unexpected result, they don't go like, shame, shame, shame. I'm such a bad scientist. What did I do wrong? No, they look at the result and they ask themselves, huh, what happened here? What can we learn from this? And this is because scientists understand that failure is an inherent part of learning. You need failure in order to learn. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: curiosity > certainty.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: What's really interesting is that this way of learning, treating failure as an integral part of learning is actually aligned with the way your brain works. Or like your brain would like to work if you allowed it to, instead of trying to cling to linear goals. So your brain works based on something neuroscientists call the perception action cycle. It sounds fancy, but it's actually very simple. The way it works is that your brain first is going to perceive information in the environment, data. Based on that data, your brain is going to make predictions, trying to figure out what's going to happen next. Sometimes the prediction is correct, and that's great. Sometimes the prediction is wrong, and that's okay too. As long as your prediction was not so wrong that you're dead, which is the worst possible outcome for an organism, then your brain is going to take that new data, that new information, and it's going to make another prediction. And this is how you learn through this perception action cycle. You perceive and then you act. You perceive and then you act. What's amazing is that there is now research showing that when you navigate the world like this, when you actually embrace your perception action cycle and use curiosity to navigate challenges, not only are you going to find solutions faster to the problems you're facing, but you're also going to experience less anxiety in the process. So that's pretty neat. Solutions faster, but also less anxiety in the process. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: action + reflection.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: The reason why scientists are so good at this is not because they're smarter than everybody else. It's because they've been trained to think like that. You might remember from your classes in high school or anyone who has studied science, the experimental cycle. And you will see it actually looks a lot like the perception action cycle. You start with observation, you formulate a hypothesis, you collect data to see if that hypothesis is correct. And again, if the hypothesis was not correct, that's okay. You use that new data to design your next experiment. This only works, though, if you always pair action with reflection. If you keep on doing the same thing over and over again without ever reflecting on the data, without ever analyzing it, you're just going to go in circles. That's not an experimental cycle. It's just you going in circles. And so that's why it's really important to always pair action with reflection. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: Developing an experimental mindset. failure = learning. curiosity > certainty. action + reflection.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Those three changes, knowing that failure is an inherent part of learning, believing that curiosity always, always beats certainty, and always pairing action with reflection and reflection with action. You can think of these as three equations that become sort of an operating system for developing an experimental mindset. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes to a diagram titled: The Experimental Cycle. The cycle includes: Observation, Hypothesis, Data Collection, and Data Analysis.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: And remember that experimental cycle I just mentioned earlier? What's great about this experimental cycle is that you actually don't need a lab to use it. You can actually use this cycle and apply it to any area of your work and life by designing tiny experiments. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: it always starts with observation.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Designing a tiny experiment always starts with observation. And I know if you're someone like many knowledge workers who are highly ambitious and highly curious, you might want to jump into designing your first experiment straight away. But you need to wait a little bit. In order to imagine what could be different, you need to know how things are right now. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: self-anthropology.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I like to call this exercise self-anthropology because the idea is to pretend that you are an anthropologist with your life and work as your topic of study. So what does an anthropologist does? They study a new culture that they know nothing about. They have zero assumptions as to how this culture is supposed to work and why. They take their notebook, they go there, and they take field notes. And they ask questions like, why are people doing things the way they are? Why do they care so much about this? Why do they follow these routines? Why do they have these habits? Why do they communicate like that? Very importantly here, an anthropologist never has any kind of judgment while they're observing the current situation. And this is what you want to do when you observe your own life and work. Spending just 24 hours taking little notes in between meetings. This gave me energy. This drained my energy. This was interesting. I felt really curious and excited when we had this conversation with my colleague. I was so bored. I wanted to go and have a nap in the corner. All of that is important data as to how you're currently working and spending your time, energy, and attention. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: I will [action] for [duration].] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Once you have enough data about the current situation, you can start formulating a hypothesis. You know what is, and you can start imagining what could be. And to do this, I have a very simple tool that will allow you to design a mini protocol for personal experimentation. I call it a pact because it is a commitment to conducting an experiment and withhold judgment until you're done for the entire duration of the experiment. The pact has two parts, the exact same parts that you have in an experiment that a scientist might conduct in a lab. A scientist will need to know what they're going to test and the number of trials. So in this case for your pact, you need to know what is the action you're curious about. What is something that you might want to tweak and experiment with and change? Not for the rest of your life, just maybe for a few days or for a few weeks. And that's the duration. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: the power of repeated trials.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Deciding on the duration in advance is extremely important. When you read scientific papers, you will always see that scientists say, we conducted this experiment with 200 participants or over the course of six months, because repeated trials is what allows you to know whether it's just a coincidence or if that outcome actually shows a pattern, something interesting that you might want to investigate further. Also, if you don't define the duration in advance, there might be a temptation to stop the experiment in the middle if the result you're getting is not exactly what you expected. So, just like a scientist, decide in advance the action, the duration, that's your protocol and then do it. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes to a list of example experiments.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I want you to see how flexible this is. Any action can work for any duration. You can use that to reach out to experts and learn from them, to test new ways to engage with your users, to manage your time differently. And here, I have only listed examples that are directly relevant to knowledge work, but remember that as a knowledge worker, your brain is your most important tool. And so you can also conduct experiments outside of work that are going to help you think better in general. One of my favorite ones is, I will not bring my phone into the bedroom for two weeks. It's an assumption that people might have that doing tiny experiments might take more time, that you need to carve out time out of your schedule to run them. But a tiny experiment can be about doing something you already do slightly differently. Maybe you want to run your meetings in a slightly different way for the next couple of weeks. Maybe you want to start using a different AI tool in order to create your presentations or brainstorm for the next month. It doesn't take more time. And whatever the outcome, you are guaranteed that you are going to learn something. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: An experimental mindset is reflection in action.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Remember the last part of the experimental cycle? Data analysis. In order for the experiment to be useful for you to grow, to create those growth loops where you iterate based on what you learn, you need to reflect on the results. An experimental mindset is really reflection in action. It's using that perception action cycle that we naturally have and leveraging it so you can explore what works and what doesn't. [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: default to curiosity.] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Overall, an experimental mindset is all about defaulting to curiosity. Anytime you're faced with a challenge, instead of responding with resistance, trying to ignore it, push it away, using willpower to push through and ignoring your mental health, it's about looking at the challenge and asking, huh, interesting, what's going on here? What can we learn from this? And this is something you can do yourself on your own as an individual contributor. But if you are in a position of leadership, this is also something you can encourage your team to do and show through your team, teaching by example. Whenever a team member comes to you and says, I'm stuck, I don't know what to do next. Huh, interesting. What can we learn from this? [Visual: The on-screen slide changes. It reads: tiny experiments can lead to remarkable changes. What will be your first experiment?] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Tiny experiments can lead to remarkable changes. Imagine a work culture where it's completely normal to walk around and ask each other, what have you been experimenting with? What was your latest failure? What did you learn? This kind of culture would be the kind of culture where not only people would be more comfortable trying new things, making mistakes, and innovating in the process, it would also be the kind of culture where people are valued not based on the quantity of answers they provide, but based on the quality of the questions they ask. Thank you. [Sound: People clapping.] Audience member: Are you doing any experiments right now? Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yes, I am. My current experiments are very personal. That's what I was talking about when I was saying as a knowledge worker, it's important to also run experiments in your personal life. I have been because of my book launch recently, I finished my PhD last year. I've been spending a lot of time in front of a screen. So the experiment I designed right now is that I'm studying one new medicinal herb every week for the next 12 weeks. What I like about it is that it has nothing to do with my work. Don't worry, I'm not going to start selling supplements or anything like this. And it also forces me to go outside because when you want to learn about plants, you can read as much as you want in books, but there's nothing like actually going in a forest, going in a field, and actually looking at it, checking how it smells and what it looks like. And so that's been an amazing experiment for me to actually get out, close my laptop, and touch some grass. [Sound: People clapping.]