I saw this post by my friend and walking buddy, Stacey Shipman, about experimenting.
When I start with new coaching clients, I invite them to think of coaching as one big experiment and their workplace as their own personal leadership lab.
What I love about this approach is the inherent lack of commitment involved. Yes, you read that correctly. I said lack of commitment.
This might sound counterintuitive. When you experiment, however, there’s no obligation to perform this new thing to infinity and beyond (have I mentioned how much I love the movie, Toy Story?). Like taking a car for a test drive before you buy it, an experiment lets you try a concept before committing fully to it.
So many of us struggle to fully commit to something new from the get-go. I think this stems from two issues.
- Doing something “new” usually translates to being “uncomfortable” until said thing becomes second nature. Many of us don’t like feeling uncomfortable.
- The “what ifs” get in the way. As in, “What if it doesn’t work?”, “What if it doesn’t have the intended outcome?”, “What if I bomb?”, etc.
Most of us don’t want to jump feet first into failure.
With an experiment, there’s no mandate for a lifelong commitment. It allows for flexibility, possibility, and choice. Making it much easier to step out of one’s comfort zone and put aside the “what ifs.”
By definition, “experiment” is “a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.”*
Take the New England Patriots, for example. This year they “experimented” with having Matt Patricia, a guy whose successful track record was as a defensive team coach, and put him in charge of coaching the offensive team.
They didn’t make the playoffs. The experiment did not produce the intended results and I suspect Bill Belichick will not be running that experiment again next season (if he still has a job.)
As Stacey says in her blog post, run the experiment. You can always go back to the old thing if it doesn’t work out.
Your call to action is to experiment with a new mindset or behavior, evaluate your results, and tweak the experiment as necessary. Need some ideas? Try this.
If you try something out and it doesn’t pan out, scrap it and try something else. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Until you find what does work.
*Dictionary.com
