Taking decisions from personal to experiments. It’s often said that “there are no bad ideas”, and this is conceptually correct but we all know that it’s impossible to have only good ideas. This phrase then is used to invite all members of an organization to participate and contribute to improving and building better tools and processes.
So while we want everyone to ideate and participate we can not realistically dive deep into all the ideas.
This causes a conundrum where it might seem as a superficial ploy to not walk the talk by management. Team member continue providing ideas and it seems like the managements preferences take precedence in majority of cases. Employees will ask, if you’re not going to use any of my ideas then why should I even bother and this is a lose-lose formula well worth the effort to avoid.
It’s also not a secret that a large number of ideas or proposals by management also are not good and eventually fail, often slower than they should. But since the management have final say on decisions, specially when it comes to allocation of resources and funds they pick what seems to be the right move, in majority of organizations.
The better way to handle this situation is to look at all ideas as potential experiments and run them thru a disciplined process. Not a months long process (might be needed for very large investments or non-reversible decisions) but disciplined, data-informed and even faster.
This way the entire process will seem (be) more objective and will empower the whole organization to contribute. It’s a way to take the “personal” out decisions in a large majority of cases which is a significant improvement over status quo. Let’s face it we are all humans and we get emotionally attached to our creations, even if only an idea. And we are not even aware of this in majority of cases. So instead of spending time and energy on unmesearable ideas and conversations let the experiment and dats help. Release personal tension too.
So how can organizations move towards a more democratic innovation and ideation process? By educating themselves and then practicing using the right tools. Transparent tools which empower everyone in the organization to get involved and we all know the benefits of that from productivity to culture, retention, advocacy and other areas.
This is precisely what we are aiming to do at Experinator and would love to work with your organization. You can sign up for a personal demo here, and we are hiring so if you’re passionate about helping people and organizations make better decisions using experiments connect with us.
