Write Yourself a Love Note

“I’m still struggling with when to experiment. Just take this week, for example: Monday was a holiday, and between Tuesday and today (mid-day Thursday), I’m on meeting #29.” “Ah! She’s got me beat! I’m on meeting 28 myself.”

We were talking with a team of senior leaders who are earnestly trying to bring tools of experimentation and idea generation into their organization, and the age old challenge of calendars came up (the prime culprit among corporate restraining forces, if you ask me).

“Write yourself a love note,” I found myself saying. “…In the form of a calendar invitation. You know the next step you need to take to get your experiments in flight. Title the calendar invite the action you need to take — send an email, check in with a subordinate for a quick 1:1, prepare to open a working session differently, etc. You don’t have to do it now, but you do have to decide when you’re going to do it now.”

“Everyone blocked the time? Now, write yourself a second love note, again in the form of a calendar notification: when are you going to assess how the experiment went? When are you going to circle back on open rates, reassess the performance of that team member, or ask how the session went?”

It’s one thing to commission experiments; it’s another thing entirely to close the loop and circle back on them. And while we don’t need to do both now — often, that’s impossible — we do need to decide when we’re going to do each one.

This itself was a bit of an experiment: I actually don’t know if it will accomplish my objective, which was to increase the rate of experiment completion. But I do know when I’ll be getting feedback: on the next team call.

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