One of the more mindblowing things I’ve learnt from recently is the following diagram, taken from cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-3453-bet
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The intuition behind it is really simple: when running org design/process/workflow experiments, don’t start out with unsafe ones — the kind that might lose you political capital. Instead start with safer experiments, rack up the wins, before you go making disruptive org changes.
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The diagram is a checklist for yourself, right as you’re considering an organisational experiment — too many items on the right side and you should reconsider what you’re attempting to do.
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Example: want to implement org wide OKRs? That’s risky!
It’s global, rigid, long duration to eval, imposes lots of changes on lots of people, and so on …
Safer experiment: run OKRs on your tiny team and report back.
Safest: run OKRs for yourself and tell people about it.
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Any successful org change requires you to get buy-in from the rest of your org. By seeing the change as a series of progressively riskier experiments, you increase the odds of success.
(Unless you already have a lot of political capital, that is. Then by all means spend it.)
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