This chapter is adapted from A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin, Jan W. Rivkin, and Nicolaj Siggelkow, “Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2012.

The dominant model is to organize knowledge work the way we organize physical work—on the basis of full-time jobs that are assumed to be permanently involved in performing the same set of activities. A more effective model is to organize knowledge work and workers around time-bound projects.

For managers, the implications of this are clear: the only sure way to increase shareholder value is to raise expectations about the future performance of the company from their current level. Unfortunately, executives simply can’t do that indefinitely.

But when I looked closely at the process, I realized that the screening methodology the client used involved projecting future sales based on currently existing data. This meant that for innovations that were minor variations on the status quo, relatively compelling data tended to be available, and these projects consistently made it through the va

I also insist that the status quo or current trajectory be among the possibilities considered. This forces the team in later stages to specify what must be true for the status quo to be viable, thereby eliminating the common implicit assumption

The member who is most skeptical about a given condition should take the lead in designing and applying the test for it. This person will typically have the highest standard of proof; if she is satisfied that the condition has passed the test, everyone else will be satisfied. The risk, of course, is that the skeptic might set an unachievable standa

managers in the layer above have got to start treating the people below them as customers—understanding their lives and needs, stepping into their shoes. That

Joe Listro, Olay’s R&D manager, explains how it went. “We started to test the new Olay product at premium price points of $12.99 to $18.99 and got very different results,” he says. “At $12.99, there was a positive response and a reasonably good rate of purchase intent. But most who signaled a desire to buy at $12.99 were mass shoppers. Very few

We push teams to specify in detail the advantage they aim to achieve or leverage, the scope across which the advantage applies, and the activities throughout the value chain that would deliver the intended advantage across the targeted scope. Otherwise, it is impossible to unpack the logic underlying a possibility and to subject the possibility to