Zombie Fingers

It's been a while since we've been in Manchester (believe it or not our last event there was April). We had a new venue at Ada College of Digital Skills and new support in organising the event in Sanjana Gupta.

We loaded the event with speakers, hailing from some of the country's leading companies such as the BBC, Siemens and Deloitte Digital and it was great to see the continued growth of the experimentation & CRO community in Manchester.

Our first speaker had come fresh from Experimentation Elite. Vignesh Lokanathan was a winner of the Test & Learn Community Summit in 2024, his moving talk on the main stage around the invisible barriers he now sees as a consequence of his sons disability was wonderfully perceptive. In Manchester his talk was entitled 'Zombie Fingers' and in a similar way was again how his own family had guided him to an important epiphany when it comes to working in experimentation.

His message was about embracing empathy when working in experimentation and the relationship between constraints and empathy, with more constraints inevitably leading to us becoming less empathetic. The key message was therefore that we should understand the needs and challenges of our colleagues in the same way that we do our customers.

He provided some practical ways that we can showing empathy. His HUSH framework of listening, understanding, staying patient and honour appreciating people helped him be able to work effectively with a busy product team to deliver a first small experimentation which began the teams journey towards an experimentation programme.

Viji Richard then took us on the intriguing journey from Mangoes to Dimensions and the lessons she had learnt along the way in an adventure which had taken her across the globe.

Finally we enjoyed our first talk based around the public sector as Zoe Gould talked about the fine balance between innovation and delivery in the public sector. A sensitive world that needs to move forward quickly and embrace the latest technologies but is fraught with challenges. It was an insightful talk and really pulled out some of the ways that innovation could be cultured in the public sector. With a wonderful callout to everyone in the audience at the end as to whether their organisations were truly fostering innovation.

Check out our next event as part of Leeds Digital Festival on 1st October in Leeds:

https://www.experimentation-north.com/events/experimentation-north-1-5

Join us for a very special event on 20th November in Leeds where we welcome former booking.com Principal Designer and author of 'Design for Impact' Erin Weigel. Sign up here: https://www.experimentation-north.com/events/experimentation-north-1-6