We solve problems every day, and discovered something big.

The solutions are already out there. You just need to know where to look. If more of us focused on what is working, rather than what isn’t, we’d make faster progress.

“How do we manage the performance of our people more effectively?” asks Sam Gowan, HR Head at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). “What motivates our people? What do they need to perform at their best?”

Whether you’re seeking to improve employee engagement or looking to create a more seamless customer experience, understanding what motivates people is key. At Fluxx, we’re just as at-home solving internal organisational problems as we are solving customer problems. And that’s just what we did with ONS.

Understanding failure doesn’t lead to success

It’s easy to talk about what’s not working. And frankly, people love doing it. But you can have a deep understanding of failure and still not know how to create success.

So rather than take the traditional problem-centred approach and ask, ‘what’s preventing our employees from performing their best?’ We asked questions like, ‘Where are things already working well?’ ‘Who is succeeding, despite imperfect conditions?’ ‘Where is motivation, collaboration and team-work thriving?’

Said another way, we set out to find ‘sweet spots’ — successful demonstrations of effective employee performance already living within the walls of the organisation.

Our thinking: if we found pockets of brilliance, we could unpick what made them that way in the first place — the drivers, attitudes and motivations that are already creating our desired behaviours. So we set out to find them.

If this school of thought interests you, read this: The Power of Positive Deviance by Richard Pascale, an associate fellow of Said Business School at Oxford University.

Prototyping organisational change ‘products’

The task now at-hand, was to decide which ideas, strategies or triggers would create the ripple effect of positive employee performance we desired.

So we did what Fluxx does best: rapid experimentation. Launching an experiment creates a real, living, new product or service. In this case, a performance management system ‘prototype.’

Our first step was to identify a series of risky assumptions — what absolutely must be true in order for the idea to succeed? Why is this important? Because if it’s not true, we’ve wasted precious time, money and resource. As the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics informing the country’s most important economic, societal and decisions — getting it wrong was not an option.

So in a workshop with key cross-departmental stakeholders, we prioritised our risky assumptions. Here’s an example of one:

1. If managers could design their own approach to managing their team, their team would be more effective.

With our assumptions prioritised, we needed to find a fast, cheap way to validate or disprove them. So the Fluxx team designed a co-creation session with HR leads at ONS to explore experiment ideas which would put our assumptions to the test. Here’s one of the ideas the team came up with:

1. The idea:
Each division takes ownership of performance management and decides how to run it based on their unique business and team needs.

The experiment:
Create the workshop materials a division head would use to design their approach. Identify a sample of division heads who would create their own DIY approach to managing their team for a three-month time-frame. Existing systems do not apply to them. Measure key performance indicators against control to understand impact of a more flexible management system.

If this this approach interests you, read this: The MVP is dead. Long live the riskiest assumption test by Rik Higham from the Experimentation Hub. Pay attention to how minimal is minimum.

We don’t know what happens next, but we know we’ll win

As this article is hot off-the-presses, our experiments are still up and running. But whatever their outcome, we know we’re onto a winner. Here’s why:

· Whether the assumptions are validated or disproved, we’ll have harvested valuable evidence to inform the next iteration of our performance management prototype.

· We didn’t dwell on or dissect problems, instead we focused on what’s already working, putting us in good stead to inspire behaviour change organisation-wide.

· Fluxx’s lean approach to solving problems both inside organisations and outside with customer has its own stack of evidence for success. We’re feeling optimistic.

For more articles like this, follow Fluxx on Medium. And if you’d like to share your thoughts or learn how to prototype your own organisational change product, email me: jenn.torry@fluxx.uk.com