Is your team dealing successfully with an uncertain environment?
You will find the answer in these questions:

1️⃣ Is the team learning from experience?
2️⃣ Are people taking risks and what’s their mindset towards mistakes?
3️⃣ Is there a systematic approach to testing and improving ideas?

Strong teams experiment and take risks!

In fact, experimentation is key for the team to cope with what change brings:

• unclear environment
• feeling insecure
• lack of expertise

Here are the 3 (+1 special) key ingredients for experimentation:

1️⃣ Create a Sandbox Environment:
Provide a safe environment where the team can break free and by that the issues to the surface, an environment where it’s safe to experiment.

In other words: don’t do experiments on the prod environment or directly in front of the client.

2️⃣ Iterate & Observe:
The most important thing for the experiment to succeed! And the most overlooked by teams…
What we most often see during our training sessions: we set a task to a team. People have an idea of how to deal with it. They decide to try it. The first attempt – failed –> “Hey teammates we have to change the idea!” And here comes their failure.

It is necessary to try an idea several times. Do not rush to change it at the first failure. Watch what happens. Collect the data and the results obtained.

3️⃣ Perform an After Action Review:
Discuss the team’s actions as soon as possible after the experiment to sync and reap the benefits of both mistakes and successes. Here’s another reason why you need the data collected from step 2!

Bonus Hint – Look at The Mirror:
Use an outside guy or a tool that will objectively do a reality check on whether the team succeeds in experimenting with their ideas. “You Can’t Read The Label From Inside The Jar!”, right?

👉 See how the After Action Review is conducted