AVOIDING MISTAKES, EXPERIMENTATION, AND THE MINDSET OF TRANSFORMATION
As clients undertake, or are about to undertake, a major transformation, I often receive the following question: “What mistakes have you made that we should avoid?” After driving and participating in many types of transformations across multiple industries and size of companies my answer is always the same. “You should make all the same mistakes.”
This isn’t to say that there are not successful tools and practices that can help drive results more quickly and reliably. But transformation requires a new mindset that is often missing in many companies, or even worse, is actively discouraged or punished. The ability to move quickly, embrace experimentation, adapt, fight complexity and allow for failure are critical for success and necessitates new mindsets and behaviors.
We have all likely experienced the program or project that spent months refining the approach, design, tools, organization and metrics only to launch, usually over an overly protracted period, to less than stellar results. Even worse, given the investment in the solution both financially by the company and personally by those involved, it is nearly impossible to make a significant course change even when there is overwhelming evidence that a correction is needed. The fact is we are just not as smart as we think we are and to assume we know all the answers up front precludes our most powerful tool, learning and adapting.
The annual planning process is often a prime example of the fore mentioned mentality where business units are expected to have all their good ideas one time a year and are asked to fully detail the answer in advance. And not surprisingly, the projects each business wants to do magically exceed whatever magical financial metric established for project approval. Business is just not that clean, and being able to be nimble and adapt as situations change is critical. Businesses, and the people within them, don’t like uncertainty. Helping organizations get to a place where they see repeated successes though a process of rapid experimentation is essential – achieve certainty through a process of experimentation and adaptation. The ability to “launch and learn” is essential, especially now in the age of AI and robotics.
So back to my answer, “make all the same mistakes”. Don’t spend your time trying to avoid all the possible mistakes and potential errors. Instead, focus on using customer insight, moving quickly, building rapid prototypes, releasing your ego, and admitting up front that your answer is not fully correct and, in some cases, may not work at all. Learn. Involve all impacted parties (and that includes customers and vendors) and be prepared for push back and responding in a way that builds stronger answers, not defending the current one.
Experimentation is a powerful tool for change. Senior leaders are risk averse and often, without asking, want complete assurance a proposed change will be successful before giving the go ahead. Asking to “just run an experiment, with close oversight and minimal investment, that can be undone at any time” is a much easier sell and will help the whole organization embrace agility and change. I can hear all those out here saying “that is not always possible”, “we are regulated”, “the investment of just the test is too high without knowing the outcome”, etc. Many of these arguments are valid, but think to yourself, how can I build in experimentation, how can I be nimbler, what processes am I using to learn and adapt quickly and am I actively allowing for and incorporating alternatives? Fighting complexity is not only avoiding complexity of design and process, but also complexity of thought as well, don’t make it complicated, get going, launch and learn.