For years I thought that pilot and prototype were just interchangeable words. To me, both just meant “let’s try it out and see how it goes”.

Recently, my thinking has changed and I see just how different these two words can actually be in practice.

I was having a great conversation around innovation with a friend in local government the other day. He was sharing with me his beliefs on how critical it is that we embrace and foster a culture of innovation in our organizations.  I wholeheartedly agreed, and echoed similar thoughts when it comes to education and just how important it is that we engage in design thinking to continually improve and deepen the learning for students and for ourselves. I also shared that where we usually fall short in design thinking is forgetting to build in iterative cycles to continually improve on our original design.  We often try something once, decide if it went well enough to repeat, and that’s that.

This is where my thinking around pilot vs. prototype changed. In my mind a pilot project is something you do to see if it meets your intended outcome (and if it does, you decide whether or not you’ll do it again).  A prototype cycle however, is a process that involves you gathering feedback, data, and observations on your prototype, with the intention of going through many iterations (with tweaks and changes all along the way).

I now see so many differences between the two…

Some may argue the difference is just semantics, but for me, since words shape our world and our actions, I’m going to officially stop using the term ‘pilot project‘ and start using the term ‘prototype cycle‘.

What do you think?

J