A Surprisingly Easy Way to Convince Anyone to Try a New Approach
Photo by Karolina Kaboompics
But they’ll never go for that! (You say to yourself.)
That’s selfish of me to ask! (You think!)
But won’t they?
And is it truly?
When I work with folks, either in a 1:1 coaching capacity, or in my group program, Time Well Spent, the goal is to make sustainable changes so that you feel good about your time at the end of every day.
And in order to do that sometimes you need to make changes that involve other people. You don’t work in a vacuum, after all!
Sometimes, it’s a meeting audit, where we reassess the calendar, and decide what needs to go, what should remain, and what needs to change just a bit to ensure the time on the calendar leaves you feeling like it’s truly a good use of time.
Sometimes, we need to make some adjustments to when we work.
Sometimes, it’s reclaiming some time during the workday to be head’s down, working on strategy, and not at the beck and call of every ping and ding.
But no matter what it is, there’s often fear and trepidation that comes up when it’s time to discuss these changes you’d like to make, with others who might be affected: colleagues, managers, partners, even kids!
And here’s one thing I know for sure:
Using language of experimentation is almost always more effective than using language of change.
Why?
Because everyone's willing to experiment (or, at least, they aren’t willing to be the jerk who’s unwilling to experiment); but no one really wants to change.
Change is hard.
With change, comes loss aversion.
People are worried that the new change will leave them stuck in a worse situation, with no recourse.
And that’s why experimentation works so much better.
With experimentation, we’re not taking a hard left and marching on forever in that direction.
When we experiment, we’re testing out a hypothesis, we’re iterating, and we’re going to see if it works better.
If it does, we’ll keep doing it.
But if it doesn’t, we can either revert to the old way,or we can try something else.
When we experiment, there’s a time limit, after which we’ll evaluate.
When we experiment, there’s a built in discussion point about whether to keep going.
When we experiment, we remove the fear, and widen the path forward.
Would you like a couple of real life examples?
Way back when, about a decade ago, I was working as an HR Director, full time, in an office.
My first kid was just finishing kindergarten.
And I’d just completed the herculean act of signing my kid up for summer day camps (if you know, you know) because, you know, I had to work and the US has zero infrastructure for working parents (but I digress).
And I’d done a sort of stupid thing.
In my effort to give my kid a varied, interesting summer, I’d signed him up for a different camp every week of the summer.
They all started at different times, ended at different times, and were all over the city. (Oops!)
And now I had a cunumdrum on my hands.
In order to get my kid to and from all these camps, at all these hours, it really only made sense for me to work from home.
But the company I worked for at the time did not have a WFH culture.
Far from it, the rule at the time was that if you had to be home for say, an appliance delivery appointment, and your kid was going to be there, well, you had to have childcare.
(The pandemic was many years in the future and, oh, how naïve we were.)
I knew I had to ask my boss to work from home.
And I knew that his first instinct was going to be “no”.
I needed a strategy, and I needed one fast, because I’d already laid down a whole lotta cash for these camps and I really didn’t have another option.
So I suggested an experiment.
I explained my predicament, and I said, “I’d like to experiment with working from home for the summer. If we’re happy with the arrangement after the summer’s over and my performance hasn’t changed, then perhaps we can continue the experiment. But if it isn’t working for any reason, then we can go back to the prior, in office, structure.”
I knew it would be fine.
In fact, I suspected my performance would only be enhanced, as I’m an introvert with ADHD who finds open office environments (like that one) incredibly distracting.
And I was right.
And my boss was fine with it.
And for the rest of the time I worked at that company, I came into the office only when needed, for big meetings, etc.
And I worked at home the rest of the time, and was promoted multiple times.
BUT, if I’d come in guns blazing saying I wanted to switch to working from home forevermore, I’m pretty sure I’d still be working in an office.
Experimentation was key.
Want another example?
This one comes up ALL THE TIME for my clients.
And it’s around meetings.
Meeting that are too frequent.
Meetings with no agenda.
Meetings that involve too many people.
Meetings that don’t work for your schedule Etc.
At first, my clients feel a lot of pressure to maintain the status quo, because of all that fear we talked about.
But then, we work together on a way to phrase it as an experiment.
Perhaps it’s an 8am meeting that conflicts with dropping your kid off at school.
And there’s fear of being selfish.
There are, after all, 10 people in this meeting, and it feels like you just have to suck it up and multitask; take the meeting, on mute, from your car, in the drop-off line, while ignoring your kid.
But then comes the experiment.
So they say “I’m wondering if we could experiment with moving this meeting from 8am to 8:30am. Would you be open to trying this for a couple of weeks and seeing if it works better for everyone?”
And what usually happens is that people say, sure, let’s try it.
And then after a couple of weeks, it’s working well, so they codify the new time.
It was much easier than expected. In fact, others had the same issue as well. And, in fact, this new situation is better or at least neutral, for the group.
Problem solved, without the friction.
So, what’s the anatomy of a good experiment? Here are a few things to remember:
Pose it as a question: “Would you be willing to experiment with…?”
Include a timeline: “Let’s check back in X weeks, and see if this is working”
Commit to actually checking back in; you want to be accountable.
Be willing to continue to iterate, or to revert. This is, in fact, an experiment, not a change in disguise!