Experimenting with change: Monday Matters #6
Collaborative Future is built with a desire to bring people together to experiment with new ways of working. Our mission is to reimagine the world of work and I often say to people that we can’t do that simply through reflecting on and talking about what’s wrong with the status quo - we’ve got to try out new things and demonstrate what change could look like.
I’ve struggled with adopting this approach in the world of business at time. People with money and power want a plan, they want forecasts, they want you to say exactly how things are going to pan out before they commit. But the problem with that approach is that the only way you can be certain of what will be is to repeat the same patterns of the past, which would cause us to even more deeply embed elements of the system that we’re trying to change. Even if we were a business that held a desire to stick to a plan and to replicate our existing system, after the past few months we all know that even the best made plans can be destroyed by something unexpected and out of our control.
We believe that experimentation is a great way of exploring completely unimaginable possibilities for the future. We also believe it’s a way of taking people who are risk averse on a journey towards change. Plus we also believe it’s more impactful longer term. Incremental change within the existing system has its place - tweaking something here or there in your recruitment process for example will create some movement towards a more diverse team but there’s the risk you won’t see enough movement and people will slip back into their old ways. Experimenting with something completely new shows the value of an entirely different system and gets people energised to build that system as quickly as possible.
So how can you go about experimenting with change in your work?
Run time-boxed pilots
One of my most successful moments of changing company culture was when I was a junior product manager and I kept saying that we needed to have smaller teams and to be running projects differently. I didn’t know how it would work entirely, and I wasn’t even certain of all the benefits or risks of the change. So I agreed with my bosses that they’d give me two weeks to run a small project with a newly formed team to see what worked and what didn’t. Getting people to feel the change in action unearthed new ideas and built huge momentum behind the changes that could not be ignored.
The time-boxed element of a pilot is important because it makes it a low risk experiment for people in power to agree to. Having two weeks to prove we could do things better if we adopted a different approach was somewhat stressful but without that agreed timeframe we wouldn’t have been granted the space to explore the possibilities without the constraints.
This is the same approach I’ve repeated for all sorts change - whether it’s running a 3 week pilot for a more collaborative approach to providing work experience or a 3 month experiment with a client to adopt radical new approaches to flexible working. Running a pilot has the power to open your eyes to more opportunities than anyone could’ve imagined.
Know your boundaries
When you’re experimenting with change, new challenges and problems will arise all the time. It’s also likely that you are pushing for change because it is deeply meaningful to you, which can cause you to get so wrapped up in it that you can no longer see where things begin and end. Time-boxing radical experimentation is one way of setting boundaries, but there are also more nuanced boundaries that you need to mark out at the start and be aware of the risks associated with pushing those boundaries.
One risk that I’m all too familiar with when pushing for change is that you burn yourself out. The risk of this is that you make poor decisions, your experiment flops or the impact you wanted to have is not sustained. If you are working long hours at the detriment to your health then you will not be successful (Ignore the utter crap that is spouted by the likes of these ‘self-made millionaires’ - you have to fit a certain mould to succeed in this way). I’ve pushed and pushed and pushed to make change happen in the past but when you are pushing against a system that does not want you to succeed the system will always win unless you rest and recuperate. This weekend, in the very early stages of bringing on board new interns and new businesses to our work placement programme, I shut off my laptop and took my daughter camping. I could’ve easily worked all weekend - I currently have a never-ending to-do list of a million things I should’ve done yesterday. But I knew that last week I was reaching my limit because my speech was erratic and my ability to make decisions was slowing.
Knowing your own boundaries will enable you to keep a consistent pace of change and help you to identify what you need to do when things start to go wrong.
Embrace failure
If you’re trying to make meaningful change happen then failure is inevitable. If you’re leading on experimenting with change then you need to keep your self-criticism in check, seek to learn from failure and use it to boost your confidence rather than allow it to knock it. Working with a coach has helped me to reflect on problems or failures in a productive way. My coach has created a safe and non-judgmental space for me to explore the important learnings of failure that will help me continue on my journey and let go of the things that are going to hold me back.
If you are wanting to support others to experiment with change you’re going to need to create this same safe space for them to share their vulnerability whilst also empowering them to build their confidence and belief in themselves. We’re supporting those on our programme to learn how to build trust, strengthen their listening practice and develop their facilitation skills to give people the tools they need to create a safe environment for others to experiment, fail and learn.
Learn the skill of facilitation
Whenever I run my facilitation training I tell everyone the reasons why I decided to become a facilitator. I was tired of teams getting together for long meetings, the same people sharing their opinions and thoughts, and then no real movement ever happening off the back of it. I wanted change. Both in the sense of wanting meetings to change, but also knowing that these collective spaces could be active vehicles of change too.
Stepping into the role of a facilitator did three things for me:
It forced me to listen. It unearthed power dynamics and unhealthy patterns of behaviour that I’d never paid attention to before.
It increased my intuition which allowed me to create space for the building momentum in any given conversation.
It showed me how the dialogue and the connections built in a facilitated group can be equally as powerful as action when it comes to sustained change.
We believe facilitation skills generally develop through practice but we offer a series of introductory courses to get you started which you can access by becoming an affiliate or collaborator on our programme.
We’d love to hear from you about experimenting for change. What has been the most exciting change you’ve ever been part of? How did you make it happen? Have you every experimented with new ways of doing things in your work? What would you really love to experiment with if you had the chance?