Experiments: Be a trial subscriber to change
I’ve got a bias towards trying things out as experiments to see what difference they make. The thing I love about experiments is that they get us away from the idea that we have to have all the answers to what we’re trying before we try it. Instead, they assume that the answer is unknown, and we have to have a go to find out.
A mistake I often see leaders make when they get up the courage to try an experiment is to fool themselves that if the experiment goes differently than they expected, they somehow got it wrong. Pretty tough on yourself there, adventurous leader. Instead, use experiments as they're intended. (Full disclosure and apologies to any scientists reading this – there’s no way I’m an experiment purist, and you might just get a bit jumpy at my carefree use of terms. Read on…). I’m all for using a hypothesis in your experiment, and seeing whether that hypothesis turns out to be supported by what you tried. For example, in the Growth experiment I ask people to run as part of my Potent Leaders group coaching series, participants are challenged to try starting their side of as many conversations as they can with questions. They give that a crack for a week and see what it changes about the relationships with their people. An easy hypothesis might be, “If I start half of my conversations with questions when people come to me with an issue, people will start coming to me having thought of some solutions themselves.” Great – now go try it out and see if that’s true. If it is, you might want to start making that a more permanent thing. If nothing changes, well, you didn’t get it wrong did you? You just discovered that your hypothesis is false. And then you might do some more thinking about why the questions you asked haven’t generated much change in the way people outsource their thinking to you 😊.
Experiments should be pretty quickfire. Two weeks max and you’re done. And if we’re using the example above, you’d of course need to start keeping track of the change in how people come to you (with a problem? With a solution? With a problem and a suggested solution? Possibly, they are coming to you less. You okay with that?) You get that, right? It’s really important that you don’t just try something, but that you attach a hypothesis to it, try it out, collect some data, and then reflect on what’s happened as a result. Then, what have you learnt from it, and what do you want to bring more deliberately into your leadership practice now?
Oh, and none of this is permanent, right? Think of any experiments that you run with your team as being like a trial subscriber to an idea. You’ll give it a go, see how it suits, decide whether or not to keep using it. If you decide to subscribe to it, great! If it’s not for you, no harm, no foul. But sheesh, at least you are trying things to keep you growing as a leader and your team always developing.