Modern Management: Encourage Experiments and Learning

How much of your work directly supports the people you lead and serve? How much of your work supports the environment or the culture so the people can be more effective? If you work directly with the people you lead and serve, you work in the business. If you work to create a better environment, you work on the business.

In my experience, direct work feels much more urgent and possibly more fulfilling than the indirect work of creating or refining an environment where people can do their best work.

Mark, a development director, had this problem. The teams didn't have enough experienced architects, so Mark acted as an architect. He also spent some time coding with teams when they encountered performance problems. The other directors also offered similar services to the teams.

Mark thought his biggest problem was not enough people, teams without enough experience and diversity. And way too much work to do.

But, the organization had trouble finding any great candidates in a timely fashion. As a result, Mark and the other directors spent a lot more time working with the teams to help them deliver products.

At first, he thought the problem was “Our hiring is screwed up.” Then he decided to be more specific and list the significant challenges.

List Your Impediments

Mark realized these problems contributed to not being able to hire great candidates fast enough:

The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) discarded resumes without the “right” keywords. Mark only realized this when he asked people to apply for open positions and learned the company had already rejected those candidates.
The recruiters continued to look for people in the places they'd always looked. The teams looked more and more alike, and the products suffered from insufficient diversity of thought and experience.
The senior leadership wanted to do “all” of the possible projects in the project portfolio—and right away. Because the teams were short-staffed, everyone suffered from multitasking. The organization's WIP (Work in Progress) was massive.

Previously, when Mark had tried to change things, he'd gathered quantitative data to show how the effect of these problems. This time, he chose a different tack.

Instead of gathering data first, he asked his peer directors to write a story about their experiences. He said, “Please pick a problem you have from this list. Then, write me a one- or two-paragraph story about that problem. Numbers might help, but I need a story.”

His fellow directors each offered him several stories.

Explain the Qualitative Stories with Quantitative Data

As Mark gathered these stories (qualitative data), he added quantitative data where it was accessible. For example, the company had spent six months searching for a person with specific—and scarce—development skills. At an online networking event, Mark met a woman with the right experience. However, she didn't have a degree in Computer Science. Even though he brought her resume to HR, they didn't start the hiring process. By the time he nudged HR, the company's primary competitor had offered her a job, which she then accepted.

Mark listed all the wasted time and the products their competitor had already announced.

Mark included stories and the waste associated with each of those stories in his memo to his senior leadership.

Ask for an Experiment

Mark worried that the senior leadership's appetite for experimentation was not very high. He explained his hypotheses and suggested these experiments with the requisite measurements:

Instead of filling out all the fields in the ATS, let's loosen our criteria and phone-screen more people. Use a two-week timebox and measure how many more applicants we want to phone-screen.
Let's try sourcing from these four places (he enumerated them) and see if we can purposefully create diverse teams, including women and people of color. Over the next three months, let's see how well we do with our hiring.
Instead of trying to do everything, let's reduce the WIP by half and see if we can't finish several projects faster in three months.

Then he asked, “What concerns do you have with these experiments?”

One of the senior leaders said, “How will you know when you succeed?”

Mark replied, “While I think these experiments will work, the point isn't to succeed. We will learn from our measures. Then we can decide what to do next.”

Another manager said, “What if the diverse people aren't as good as the people we have now?”

Mark said, “As I network with potential candidates, I realize they are often ‘better' than the people we have now. They've had to learn to be better just to compete.”

The senior leaders weren't excited about the experiments, but since the timeboxes were relatively short, the leaders agreed to try.

Assess the Results as You Proceed

Over the next few weeks, Mark and the directors learned about their hiring process:

Even with more relaxed criteria, the ATS helped them stay legal but otherwise slowed their hiring. They needed to remain legal for the candidates. They also needed to speed their intake and initial assessment of candidates.
The places Mark identified to hire people weren't enough because they found too few people of color. Although, they did find more women. And some of their compensation packages were not competitive enough to attract the candidates they wanted.
The senior leaders and the product people needed more frequent changes to the project portfolio than one quarter. That meant the projects needed to deliver value more often so the leaders could change the mix of projects.

However, after a month, Mark and his colleagues realized the teams made more progress because the managers worked on the business, not in it. That one realization made the experiments worth the time it took to create them.

Mark's approach:

List the problems you see and choose a specific hypothesis you'd like to investigate.
Use stories as qualitative data to explain the impact of those problems. Also, use quantitative data if you have it, but focus on the stories.
Propose experiments and report back on your measures.

I can't guarantee this approach will work all the time. However, people often respond better to stories than to “cold” data. And if you worry that you stay stuck in urgent work (in the business), consider experiments and learning for your important work so you can work on the business.

Much of this is from Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization. Note: I've written more about experiments for planning. See What Happened to the Beautiful Plans? (They Became Experiments) for one example.

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Johanna