Experimentation in Business

The one thing that every business is assured of is that things change.  Whether it’s a change in your team, your customers or your market, as business owners, we are constantly working hard to adapt to these changes and capitalize on the opportunities that change can bring.

While working with many business owners, we find that what worked to make their organization successful in the past, may not be the optimal solution for them in the future. In order to continue to be a successful enterprise in today’s market, our systems, our cultures, and our leadership styles need to be adjusted and adapted.

To meet the challenges of today’s changes, our organizations need to adapt in such a way that require not only innovative thinking, but also require the willingness to experiment with trying something new. When you embark on experimenting with new ideas for change in your business, there are some key points to keep in mind:

• Brainstorm with your team what specific change you can make and the impact it would have on the organization.
• Answer the question: What results do we want to see with the change?
• Gather data related to the change you want to make and ask relevant questions.
• Evaluate how you will measure the change.
• Decide which change will be made, execute a plan, and set a time frame for the team to meet to evaluate the change.
• Determine whether the change was effective and whether it should be kept, modified or discarded.
• Try again until you get the results you were looking for.

At KOS we are currently engaged in an experiment for changing the dress code policy in 2016. Our goal is to help our team members be more comfortable while working the long hours of our busy season. We decided to extend our casual dress wear policy from Friday only, to all business work days. We agreed that we would try this experiment for six months. After six months, we will get feedback from the team regarding the effectiveness of the change, and determine whether to make the change permanent, modify it, or try something else. 

Every experiment for change will be not successful. Sometimes an experiment will fail and we have to try something else. When those failures happen, we need to do a careful review of the results and work towards a better solution.

Thinking of trying an experiment for change in your business? Have you tried an experiment and it didn’t work? Feel free to reach out to your contact at KOS, we will be happy to discuss how we can help your business experiments be a success.