Summary:
- While every leadership journey is unique, shaped by an individual’s own strengths, challenges, habits, and context, some leadership skills are remarkably relevant across a wide range of professional and personal contexts.
- The skill of designing and running “experiments” is not only remarkably relevant in a wide range of contexts, but highly resource efficient.
- Leaders who visibly practice designing and running experiments model a safe way for others to become more engaged and support their teams and the organization as a whole.
- The experimental mindset applies both to personal leadership development (developing new skills), and to the development of shared processes and products.
Whether you’re dealing with a deficiency or seeking to scale success, leadership is a constant confrontation with change. (personal note: sorry and/or thank you, depending on how you feel about alliteration.) How you approach change as a leader can have an enormous impact on your own performance, that of your team, and even on the performance and culture of your organization as a whole.
One approach to change – what we call the Experimental Approach – enables leaders to quickly identify what works, pivot from ineffective strategies, and optimize resources efficiently by simultaneously avoiding overinvestment and underinvestment in change initiatives. Moreover, the experimental approach promotes adaptability and agility, essential qualities in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Leaders who cultivate this skill empower their teams to take calculated risks, learn from failures, and drive meaningful improvements, ultimately boosting both performance and long-term organizational success.
How Do You Navigate Change?
Change Strategy #1: Stick to Standards
Sticking to standards means staying close to a model that’s known to work. The “Stick to Standards” approach to change can be summed up as:
- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
- If something needs fixing, comprehensively define the new standard (preferably something within the existing paradigm), get there, and stick to the new standard.
The Stick to Standards approach can be enticing as the downsides are somewhat delayed and obscured. What is the cost of a road not taken? One can never say exactly and for certain. Nevertheless, sticking to standards frequently means passing on both small and significant opportunities for change along the way. When we wait to change until it is abundantly clear that change is a necessity then that change often comes with high costs, overcorrections, and few strategic alternatives.
Change Strategy #2: Take An Experimental Approach
The Experimental Approach to change takes a different stance:
- Nothing is completely broken, nor completely perfect.
- Lets learn as we go by involving key stakeholders in incremental, participative change.
If you’ve been trained in Lean or Six Sigma, it’s likely that you’ll find the experimental approach quite intuitive. You may already be benefiting from running experiments whether it’s a formalized practice in your organization or not.
To make things more clear, let’s look at how to conduct an experiment, and some examples.
How to Conduct an Experiment
- Step 1: Define Your Hypothesis. Turn a hunch into a clear, “If X, then Y.” statement.
- Step 2: Define the Stakeholders & Roles. Who has a stake in this, and what part might they play?
- Step 3: Define Boundaries: Under what conditions will the experiment end? What’s out of bounds?
- Step 4: Gather Feedback & Begin: Your stakeholders hold key insights. Ask, revise, and when safe, begin!
Let’s review some scenarios to get a clearer idea of how experiments look in practice.
Example #1: Changing a Business Process
Hypothesis: A modified client onboarding process may increase 3 month client satisfaction scores.
Stakeholders: All sales reps and account owners associated with 10 new clients.
Boundaries: The experiment will end when either of the following conditions are met: A) 10 news clients have gone through the modified onboarding process, or, B) 4 months have passed from the experiment’s launch date.
Feedback: After asking stakeholders for feedback, account owners offer the following amendment to the boundaries: “Additionally, any account owner may unilaterally decide to veto the implementation of the modified onboarding process for any reason.” The amendment is accepted and the experiment begins.
Example #2: Practicing New Leadership Skills
Hypothesis: Using a specific feedback framework will help me improve my skill in giving and receiving feedback, as reflected in my next 360 evaluation.
Stakeholders: All colleagues that will receive my feedback or give me feedback on my next 360 evaluation.
Boundaries: The experiment will run from now until my next 360 evaluation, at which point I will review the feedback that others have given me on how I give and receive feedback.
Feedback: To avoid being overly formal or taking time out of people’s day, I will simply inform my colleagues over email that I will be trying out some new feedback skills over the next couple of months.
How Culture Shapes Experiments
Many of our clients – especially those in tech, and younger organizations – find it natural to adopt an experimental mindset. The “move fast and break things” ethos made famous in software companies lends itself perfectly to the Experimental Approach to change. After only one or two experiments, leaders can find themselves navigating significant changes while building buy-in and reducing opportunity for any meaningful negative outcomes.
By contrast, other organizations – especially those in highly regulated industries such as Healthcare or Finance – have an inherent cultural resistance to the experimental approach. Standards in such institutions can be tantamount to the sacred, and for good reason! In such cultures, it may be more difficult to apply the experimental approach, but not impossible, and steps 2, 3, and 4 may be significantly more detailed than the examples above.
The Experimental Approach to Change: Simple, Scalable, & High ROI
Leadership is a constant confrontation with change. Whether you’re developing new leadership skills, or seeking to change some process and achieve new results, the experimental approach to change offers a simple, repeatable way to design, test, and learn from new ideas while respecting everyone’s time and boundaries, and minimizing risk.
As one develops skill in designing and running experiments, the practice can easily transfer into new roles with categorically different responsibilities. Because running experiments involves engaging stakeholders and getting feedback, the practice has a way of scaling itself naturally throughout the organization. Overall, the Experimental Approach to change is a leadership skill that costs remarkably little to implement while offering diverse and scaling sources of value.