Why are we doing this? Everything as an experiment.

April 2022.

Following on from a previous post about feedback loops and learning https://collectednotes.com/garethlw/a-learning-organisation, I have been reflecting on my own use of experimentation outside of product development to organisational change.

In many organisations where we are actively embracing continuous improvement practices- what practical steps can we take to evaluate change and cultivate learning?

For any change-

How do we know we are on the right track?
Are we achieving the outcome(s) we hoped for?

We need to be able to answer these questions, how do we ensure we aren't blindly layering change on top of change, without taking a moment to reflect, inspect and adapt, know when to start and stop.

An example.

I recently started working with an organisation who had started to utilise the LeSS framework. This lead to a significant change to their scrum teams makeup, communication (through LeSS events), product backlog and extending into deployment approach. From a coaching standpoint and coming into the picture whilst this was in play- what are we hoping to see by adopting LeSS? What problems and/or opportunities are we hoping to address and what does success look like?

In many instances, the answers to such questions aren't always available. In this example, beyond "adopting LeSS" it would be good to know the context beneath that. Similar to a "transformation", the underlying outcomes sought give a clearer picture to work from, know you are going in the right direction and connects people to an overarching goal.

How will we know when we are successful?

This feels like a very simple question to be able to answer, but often overlooked.

What can we do?

I like to use a form of hypothesis/experiment canvas for any change which can be used as a basis for group discussion. (hat tilt to Jeff Gothelf, link below and also to John Cutler for the prompt style!)

Title/Description
We want to try this because...
How long for?
By doing this we hope to see...(including measures here).
We will watch out for (acknowledging you may not catch everything)

"We want to try this because" as a prompt helps reflect on why, be it to validate an assumption or test a hypothesis.

"We will watch out for" is useful because it enables reflection on impacts we might see as a result of the change.

This provides a clear agreed intent, a time box and with it a review point to evaluate if the change has the desired effect and consider and review unintended consequences since change in systems typically results in change in other variables in the system. Taking a step further it may be worth considering techniques such as causal loop diagrams to illustrate such relationships.

This isn't perfect but it does give a reflection point. Is this change giving us the desired effect and if not, we can stop it.

A simple canvas capturing information in this way could be used for a broad range of contexts, ranging from small experiments in a team, broad organisational changes to more specific uses such as exploring career conversations.

Links:

Jeff Gothelf`s UX canvas https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/leanuxcanvas-v2/

John Cutler's blog -https://cutlefish.substack.com/

https://thesystemsthinker.com/causal-loop-construction-the-basics/