In this post we focus on using micro-experiments to transform how you problem solve and elevate your performance above the baseline you established for how you work.
The below framework can be applied to a variety of situations, big and small. And it’s followed by an example to illustrate how it’s applied.
1. Pick the Problem
Pick one of the items you uncovered (or have know about about but only recently have come to terms with) during the three feedback sessions with yourself, your team and your personal board. Start small, so it’s manageable. Ideally something that is likely to recur in the next week or two so you don’t have to wait too long until it happens again. (Do not choose the hairiest problem straight out the gate. You want to get some practice in before you tackle that.)
2. Design Your Experiment
Think critically about the result you want and what you could have done differently to arrive at a different, better outcome. Write it down. Talk to your team and/or personal board members to flesh it out, and use them as a sanity check on your thinking.
3. Run the Experiment and Measure
Next time that same situation pops up, run the experiment you came up with. Review the result and gauge whether it was better (or worse) than the previous status quo.
4. Repeat
If you’re not satisfied with the results, then go back to #1 and try again.
Example: Co-founder drama
Problem - My co-founder and CTO, Tom, and I have grown apart over the years and while Tom’s still at the company, I’m feeling increasingly distant from him. I leave every 1:1 meeting we have with the same feeling — in the early days, we were in the trenches together and every decision we made, we made together. Now though, I continually question whether he’s just too overworked and burnt out, hates working with me and being at this company, or he’s just not up to the task of his new role and needs to be moved on.
Design - I, the CEO, want to figure out what’s really going on with Tom. Through my conversations with my team and personal board, I suspect that I’m inserting my own imagined narrative — that Tom is bad, stupid, or lazy — instead of seeing what’s really going on. I’d like to breakthrough my frustration and figure it out, bringing a stronger operating rhythm to our engineering org and establishing greater alignment and sync with our CTO.
Thinking critically about my personal role in this repeatedly for the last several months, I make a couple observations: I don’t sit next to Tom anymore (that changed about a year ago when we hired another 25 people) and my weekly check-ins by phone/zoom with Tom tend to be operationally focused; we usually stare at Pivotal Tracker together reviewing our feature backlog and bug list, or prioritizing client deliverables.
I decide to try writing an email to Tom explaining how I’m feeling and taking personal responsibility for the changes that I think could be impacting the situation, and I ask him to reflect a bit too and come to our next 1:1 ready to talk about it.
Experiment - I sit down on Saturday morning and spend an hour writing an email to Tom. I show a copy to Susan (on my personal board) because she also knows Tom pretty well, and then I fire it off.
Sunday morning Tom replies by email…
And with that cliffhanger, end scene.
Whether this experiment results in a better result for our CEO or not isn’t necessarily the point, because the CEO should just repeat the exercise until they are satisfied. What we hope you do takeaway from the example though is a clearer understanding of how something as small as sending an email you otherwise wouldn’t have written can be an incredibly valuable experiment to a very real and persistent problem you’re experiencing.
References
Understanding how you “work”
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