How do you track your experiments? How are you tracking on those New year resolutions from 6 months ago, what new goals or reflections have you done? How are you keeping focused? What gets measured, gets your focus, what gets your focus, gets done and what gets done can be improved.
Last year our team went through the Design thinking workshops internally. From the sessions, we had a bunch of experiments we wanted to do to improve our interactions with our customers. These experiments were random “how might we” ideas the team wanted to try out. There was no timeframe for them, no success measures, and no review of the outcome.
In order to track how we were going with our experiments; both the ones to improve the lives of our customers and the ones to improve the team, I introduced the team to the celebration grid from management 3.0 along with experiment cards.
We had two goals.
- Create some criteria around the experiments the team had identified and were running from the Design thinking workshops.
- To take the learnings and tweak the experiment or celebrate success and embed it into the team’s best practices.
I found that even though the team was comfortable with the idea of experimenting, putting the learnings or success into actions going forward was harder to grasp. We made a few tweaks to the team’s social contract and created new experiments to try (Deloittes has a great facilitated smart meetings template for ways of working on Miro).
From facilitating this session I learned that I pitched experiments at the wrong level for the team. I had assumed the team already had an understanding of what a good experiment would look like, how to write one, define scope, metrics, and timeframe, this meant that the flow of the workshop was impacted and we didn’t get to address creating a cadence for review and reflection to identify learnings from the mistakes column due to time constraints. From pitching at the wrong level, I learned that I would change the approach the next time I run this as follows:
- Review of current practices in terms of what is working and what is not.
- Brainstorm reflection and review of learnings from mistakes.
- Add learnings to our best practices and make note of areas we want to run experiments.
- Walk through what a good experiment looks like.
- Template, and how to write one.
- Review and reflection of current experiments
- What have we learned, what worked, does anything need to change,
- Is it finished and are we moving to best practice or tweaking the experiment.
- Reviewing and deciding on the next priority experiment. Using a decision method like Value vs effort
- Updating our visual flow through the celebration grid and celebrating what is working for us.
The team’s aha moment came from acknowledging what was working for them; for example, the appreciation experiment from our last sprint was moved to best practice to ensure it became an ongoing practice. . My next iteration is to explain what a good experiment looks like and use the following experiment template to guide the team. I also want to tweak the celebration grid template to show the pipeline and the experiments we are currently working on in the form of a vertical Kanban board. In progress experiments at the top of the canvas and results of the experiments recorded on the canvas. This will create transparency and visibility in our intentional experiments.
Too often it seems we just try something without really thinking about how we will know if it worked or even what the desired change or outcome is that we are trying to achieve. Instead of just asking and giving it a go, how about we look at what it is we actually want to change, create a timeframe for the change, and also ask why and most importantly why now?
