The Dirty Word in Corporate
Channel: Danelle Jones | Tribe Leadership Retreats
Date: 2022-03-16

Last week we set up the ‘explore exploit sustain’ view of our portfolio - and I want to dive deeper into something that comes up regularly with my clients… it’s a bit of a dirty word… but it doesn’t need to be.

Experimentation.

This word strikes fear into the hearts of executives - I think it may actually cause more visible discomfort than “PCI compliance”.

The implication seems to be that “we don’t know what we’re doing” - activation point number one. Because we’re always supposed to be in control and know all the answers.  (Ba-bow).

And then it gets worse - we’re going to try a bunch of things.  But because historically and systemically we have a culture that does not include structured feedback, we unwittingly feel really nervous that our team could be throwing around ideas in the dark and we might never get to a conclusion…

So what do we do?

We use the same old logic that got us here to try and solve the problem - we dive into analysis (paralysis) as we try to figure out the answer before we start.

Next minute we’ve spent months going around in circles, justifying our existence, looking for more and more information to try and answer something unanswerable, and at some point we decide to commit - probably way too late in the picture for our implementation to be effective, and then we put a project manager in charge to rigidly stick to the scope least we diverge from the on-paper answer.

And we wonder why a common complaint is that we take too long to deliver and cost too much.

This episode is about breaking the cycle :)

#LearningOrg #ResponsiveOrganisation #HighPerformingExecutives