187 — The GP Book Club: Stefan Thomke's Experimentation Works

To what extent are our decisions at work based on data and testing, versus hunches and gut feelings? In Experimentation Works, Stefan Thomke argues that the scientific method should drive business decisions and has the potential to improve performance.

On this week's episode of The Good Practice Podcast, Ross D is joined by Owen, Ross G and Nicola for the second in our series of bimonthly 'bookclub' episodes. We discuss: 

• our general impressions of the book
• the opportunities created by experimentation at work
• the challenges associated with workplace experiments.

Show notes

The paper Ross G and Owen discussed on the minimum user count for online experiments is (on review) a little vague on what counts as an 'active user', but can be found here: Kohavi, R., Deng, A., Frasca, B., Walker, T., Xu, Y., & Pohlmann, N. (2013, August). Online controlled experiments at large scale. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 1168-1176).

Experimentation Works is available from Amazon and, hopefully at some point in the future, your local bookseller: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Experimentation-Works-Surprising-Business-Experiments/dp/163369710X

Ross G's 'deep cut' was to episode 30 of our show: https://podcast.goodpractice.com/compliance-training-ticking-a-box-or-having-an-impact

The book Ross referenced was The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professor-Madman-Simon-Winchester/dp/0060175966 

The film version of this book, The Professor and the Madman starring Mel Gibson, is streaming now on Amazon Video.

Ross G also recommended the FIIT app for yoga: https://fiit.tv/

Shakespeare's quarantined writing efforts have been covered thoroughly in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/22/shakespeare-in-lockdown-did-he-write-king-lear-in-plague-quarantine

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:

• Ross Dickie @RossDickieEW
• Owen Ferguson @owenferguson
• Ross Garner @RossGarnerEW
• Nicola Boyle @Nicola_BoyleEW