Three reasons to start your office experiment right now
And give your idea some legs
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I know you’ve had some brilliant ideas. Everyone does. That’s what showers, cycling to work and leisurely strolls do to people: we come up with stuff to make things better. I want to make sure your idea has legs.
After your ‘best idea ever’ you usually get bogged down in the humdrum of your 9–5 and forget all about it. Or if you talked to your boss, he’ll ask you to write up “a business case”, office slang for “it’s not gonna happen”. This involves endless meetings and calculations and no idea nurturing whatsoever. This is too often where your idea comes to a halt.
It doesn’t have to be like that. There is another way we call “office experimentation”. Based on lean and agile practices common at startups and accelerators, it evolves around what HBR called the “test-and-learn mindset”. You focus on learning as much as you can instead of avoiding risk. You divide your project in chunks, and test every chunk to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
This approach gets applied to big projects, such as new products (it’s what pharmaceuticals have always done). In our experience, if you take the core of this idea, you can apply it to almost any challenge. The principles work just as well for changing your own workflow, as they do for upsetting your company’s product portfolio.
Have an idea that’s worth trying? Here are three reasons to go run your own experiment.
- You don’t have to ask for permission
It’s a quiet Thursday and you’ve just doodled the schematics of a new machine on some post-its. It’s brilliant and you get another colleague excited. Together you spend a couple more Thursdays talking and scheming. After another few Thursdays you have high hopes, a Powerpoint presentation and a spreadsheet.
The latter shows that your machine will increase the yearly profits of your company by 100k. All your boss has to do is invest 500k right now. Please sign here.
But your boss says no.
Well you didn’t need money or permission to take the first step and you don’t need them to take the next. The actual machine might cost 500k, but a prototype might cost just 500.
Once boardrooms have experienced a demo backed up with real user feedback, no matter how basic, they’re easy prey to a good idea.
2. You get to scratch your own itch
A lot of successful companies are born because someone got fed up with something and decided to fix it. It’s easy to apply the same principle to fix the annoying parts of your daily office life. All it takes is a little courage.
Having difficulty staying focused during long meetings? Introduce a new meeting discipline. Does everybody always show up late for appointments? Try scheduling your meetings at three minutes past (I know it’s silly, but it really works). Are your colleagues reluctant to follow your latest suggestion? Next time, ask them this question: “Would it hurt the company if we tried it for three weeks?”
If your idea works, onto the next itch. Does it still itch after three weeks? Don’t stop scratching.
3. #Getoutoffyouroffice
Everyone has a story about something that seemed great on paper and great in the boardroom, only to suck tremendously on the work floor.
Here’s another story: Mr X is the CEO of a big real estate maintenance company. He’s unhappy with the amount of fixing jobs his crew can handle per day. He decides to join one of his crews and is struck by the hassle with notebooks, maps and drawings. Back in his office he arranges two iPads and gives them to the crew he spent the day with. Three months later all of his crews are outfitted with iPads. Not just because it’s fun, but because it works.
Running experiments is a great excuse to leave your desk, and ask real people what they really need. That’s very different from teaching people how to do what you think they should do. After all, what’s an experiment without some guinea pigs?
Still not sure if you’ll run an office experiment of your own? In that case I’d like to refer you to someone far wiser (and smaller) than I am:
This is the first instalment in our series about office experimentation. How do you test, run and scale successful business experiments? In the following instalments we will cover various topics from selecting the right experiment method, to getting C-level support, to dealing with the naysayers.
Ready to run your own experiment? Map it with our Experiment Planner.
Mats Siffels is Partner at Professional Rebel. He’s also a master in strategy and wants to share the tools and tips to help people drive change in their working and daily lives. He has a diverse group of people who inspire him including NBA coach Gregg Popovich, Grammy-nominated trumpeter Christian Scott and Italian restaurateur Massimo Bottura.
Get in touch with Mats: LinkedIn | Twitter
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