Three reasons why you should become an experimental leader

One of the things most leaders struggle with is that their organisational cultures resist change and progress, with a tendency to cling fast to the status quo, whether it is healthy or dysfunctional. I guess it’s part of the human condition, but it is also a huge problem for the leader who aspires to bring about better things.

I believe that one of the most important things any organisation can do is develop a culture of experimentation, where there is an openness to trying out new things and freedom to experiment and play outside the box. I often encourage leaders to move quickly to start pushing the box out by suggesting a variety of experiments, often with a time limit, a stop point to evaluate success, and the clear intention to keep what works and kill what doesn’t.

I see three huge strategic benefits to this approach:

1. You open up the door in a non-threatening way to try stuff and begin to shift your organisational culture to one where change becomes the norm. Putting change in terms of experiments often provides a freedom that is simply not there when it sounds like the change might be permanent. Insisting that success will be evaluated at a set point in time gives people comfort that they may not be stuck with something that doesn’t work. This can be a crucial cultural shift.

2. You open the door in your organisation to measuring things. Many organisations have created protectionist cultures that eschew measurement and evaluation because it’s safer and easier to avoid that kind of critique and feedback (another part of the human condition), and yet every effective leader knows that measurement is crucial to forward progress. Measurement is a huge question (what to measure, etc.), but until you can get your people used to the idea that measurement is ok, then everything will continue on in a vague fog of feelings about how we’re going rather than any serious metrics. So, when you pose an experiment which will be explicitly evaluated, you begin to introduce measurement into your culture, and that’s a huge step forward in itself.

3. You open the door to killing things that don’t work. Most well-established organisations have an enormous momentum towards maintaining “the way we have always done it”, ensuring that change is very unattractive. Some things may be abject failures to the external observer, and yet will be clung to with an amazing tenacity, often quite irrationally. When you begin to experiment with a stated openness to killing something that doesn’t work, you begin to create a culture that says failure is ok because it teaches us things, and it’s ok to stop things if they’re not accomplishing or contributing.

These three benefits alone make creating an experimental culture a no-brainer… it’s surprisingly easy to get people to try stuff if they sense that it is just a trial or experiment, and the changes that ensue in your culture can often be life-changing. You will be a more effective leader if the word “experiment” becomes a regular part of your vocabulary. Give it a go… try it out… :-)