How to use tiny experiments to solve big problems at work

By Jennifer Mizgata

Q: I’m at an impasse. Or really—my team keeps getting stuck. I manage a team full of passionate people who care a lot about their work. But they also keep getting into the same debates over and over. I could script it at this point. I watch the same interpersonal dynamics play out over and over again in meetings. I can feel the energy draining from the team when it happens.

How can I switch up the team dynamic and get them to work in a different way?
—Morgan

It sounds like you have a team of people who care a lot about their work and keep going to bat for their ideas, which can be really rewarding sometimes and exhausting to manage other times. While it’s tempting to try something drastic to shake things up, my recommendation is that you start with something small and actionable.

Try some tiny experiments.

“Tiny experiments are a way to try to introduce new ideas or create new behaviors, within a group that you might be working with, or yourself,” business and design strategist Tran Ha told me. “They are small or tiny in scope, so that they make that change feel less overwhelming and intimidating.”

Tran is a frequent collaborator of mine who introduced me to tiny experiments years ago. Since then, I’ve often used the concept to help folks whom I work with break down big problems. I’ve also used it personally, from fine tuning how I work from home to better understanding how to navigate my anxiety. It’s an approach that’s flexible enough to use in a range of situations, but structured enough that it can help you break down things that are tough to tackle.

Tiny experiments are great for managing culture change and tackling complicated problems because they give you an entry point. People are complicated, and how they interact can be a lot to unpack, especially when those dynamics have become ingrained at work. This is why starting super small can be so helpful.

“It’s breaking down change into digestible bits, attacking it a little bit at a time, rather than doing an entire overhaul, which can feel really overwhelming and also threatening for some people,” Tran told me.

The true magic in tiny experiments is in the approach and how it helps you get buy-in. By looking at what you’re doing as an “experiment,” you reframe this ongoing problem into something a little lower stakes. By tackling one small piece, you’ll start to untangle some of the overlapping threads to get a better understanding of what forces are combining to create the dynamic that keeps repeating. You’re dealing with real people, who have feelings, habits and histories that bump up against each other, and sometimes competing versions of reality.

In your case, you’re not trying to make people on your team less passionate or less interested in advocating for their ideas. You are looking for something that might reset the chemistry in how they’re interacting with one another.

To get started, you need to spend some time understanding the problem you’re trying to solve (in this instance: how to adjust the group dynamic). Identify what you can about who and what are influencing your problem. Then, name one very small thing you can do that might shift the dynamic. If your experiment feels overwhelming, start even smaller—remember, you’re looking for something tiny to shift.

Here are a few prompts that you can use to sketch out your tiny experiment. Copy them into a doc, your bullet journal, or just write them out on a piece of paper.

The problem I’m trying to solve is______
My tiny experiment will be ______
I’m going to try it from __ (date) to __ (date)
I’m hoping to see (or here’s what I hope will change)______
I might be blocked by ______
Success would look like ______
I will check in on how it’s going by __ (date)
I’d like to share results with ______

The first four prompts are the most important. The other four might be optional or unknown at the outset, depending on your experiment. You can also use these prompts to run a tiny experiment, then use them again to build on the work you did the first time around.

Tiny experiments work best when you have some control in a situation. You can do the experiment yourself (or with a small group of people), and it’s helpful if you put time parameters on it. You should choose to experiment with something that can be undone later. This isn’t about suddenly rolling out a whole new communication tool or making a change that massively disrupts everyone’s schedule. It’s about intentionally focusing on one aspect of a problem and testing something to see how it works or how people respond. You’re looking to learn something with your experiment.

If you’re aiming to shift how people are reacting to each other, you could experiment with how ideas are getting shared with the team. Have people draw instead of write or shout out ideas in a brainstorm. Rotate how you get people to participate in the meeting. Test a way for people to anonymously give feedback or new ideas. Experiment with having someone new asking questions or facilitating the conversation. Bring a guest in for part of your regular meeting. Think about something easy to do that might give you a little information about the dynamic or the players where you work and what they need to feel heard.

Your job is not to be the master of their reality or dictate how your coworkers interact. You’re interested in giving people some perspective to help them see how defending their own ideas might get in the way of folks working together. Tiny experiments are great for this because they’ll move you from a situation where people are throwing around ideas about what they think other people should be doing, and move you into a place where you have some data that will help you find productive ways to reroute energy.

After you experiment, look at how people respond and use that data to help you continue to build on your experiment. Do people engage differently when they have time to see ideas in advance of the meetings? Interesting. Do you get different types of ideas or feedback when it’s anonymous? Great data points. When everyone draws something quickly, do they smile and laugh when they show their sketches to each other? Sounds like something to build on.

You’re not looking to solve the entire problem with your experiment. You’re just trying to make some headway on it.

“[Tiny experiments] go wrong when they’re not small enough in scope and when people are still trying to do too much,” Tran notes. “It’s either starting too big, or it’s being too vague about what it is that they’re trying to achieve.”

Using tiny experiments at work is inspired by an idea from BJ Fogg, a behavioral scientist from Stanford, known for tiny habits. “If you design for outcomes, you’re designing at the wrong place. You need to design for behaviors that lead to the outcome,” he says in his TED Talk.

Tran and I have seen that this is just as important when thinking about how to make change at work as it is when adjusting your personal habits.

“So often we are rushing to put out fires, and we jump straight to solutions. And oftentimes they’re the solutions for the wrong problem,” Tran says. “Tiny experiments force you to not rush, and to spend some time interrogating the problem space, because you’re forced to focus deliberately on such a disciplined one change that you’re introducing. I think it really forces you to explore the problem space a little bit more intentionally.”

Crucially, tiny experiments can also help you get other people on board with change. Instead of going to your team with grand ideas about “what they’re like” and how you can “fix them,” your approach moves the focus away from subjective speculation. The results of what you explored give you some data to present when you’re pushing for bigger changes. It’s much easier for someone to buy into something that has been tested in some way than to green-light an ambiguous, untested idea. You can also use your data to push back against ideas that you don’t think will work. You’ll be coming from a much stronger position than if you were shooting down ideas without anything to back you up.

The thing I love the most about tiny experiments is that I’ve seen so many people use them to create momentum. It works. Together, Tran and I run the Women’s Leadership Accelerator, an intensive program for women managing people and projects in journalism. We give these women practical tools to help them lead innovation and manage change, and in the past four years, we’ve passed along the life-changing magic of tiny experiments to over 100 women in our cohorts.

Some of my favorite examples of our tiny experiments include…

Working from home one day a month (proposed by an introvert who had trouble getting things done in an open office; her experiment led to a new work-from-home policy)
Taking all of the chairs out of a meeting room (Tran’s go-to example for a change that can be surprisingly effective in altering a dynamic and “undoable”)
One lunch a week not at their desk (a first step for a chronically overbooked person who has since stopped booking daylong back-to-back and overlapping meetings)
Creating a space and a ritual to pack my laptop up overnight, jokingly referred to as “Good night, Computer” (one of many tiny experiments I strung together to help me switch off from work while working from home)

“It is a really powerful way to think about navigating change, and developing leadership qualities and behaviors that make you more resilient in navigating change and uncertainty. Right now, everything is uncertain, and so many of our industries are being reshaped,” Tran says. “It makes navigating all of this change and uncertainty a little bit less scary to have a few of these tools.”

All of this feeds into why tiny experiments can be helpful for you—both as a person and as a manager. Beyond finding ways to get people excited when they’re feeling stuck, you might also find that the inspiration strikes in other ways—your tiny experiments can be as wild and creative as you like. You’ll also make allies in unexpected places, as people respond to your experiments or as you bring in new collaborators. Either way, tiny experiments will help you learn something new and bring fresh energy into your work dynamic. And along the way, they can also help you gain confidence in your own ideas and your leadership.

How to use tiny experiments to solve big problems at work

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