Transform Your Business by Encouraging Experimentation and Change

September 14, 2020 4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Outstanding leadership is required to affect positive change in your organization. It takes deliberate planning and execution. It doesn’t occur as a natural by-product of an unexamined routine.

To create change within your business, a leader must actively plan for transformation. You can determine how to implement that change by looking to your staff. Transformation is all about people. It takes human resources to initiate and execute a strategy. On the other end, the plan will impact the same humans, so they have a stake in the business transformation’s success. When your people invest themselves in a successful outcome, they are more likely to be paramount in planning and execution.

Related: To Survive and Thrive, You Need a Growth Mindset

In the present business climate, administrators and supervisors need to present creative, original plans and thoughts to gain consideration, acquire more clients and raise benefits. The ability to recognize where and how these changes need to happen comes with experience. Put in place the systems, resources and organizational designs that allow for large-scale experimentation.

The untapped potential of any organization is limited only by the creativity of individual change-makers. When a company invests in experimentation, that investment inspires employees’ creativity and initiative-taking and brings significant and rewarding change to the company. To be a fruitful pioneer, you must demonstrate an interest in your team members and what they each bring to the table. The more open you are to other people and their ideas, the more innovative your team becomes. 

Start by identifying your primary goal for change at your company, then use the experimentation process to map out the steps and smaller changes you and your team must make to help your goals become a reality. Evaluate the services and products that warrant your resources and invest your energy and focus on your greatest opportunity to increase revenues and profits.

Related: How to Give Creativity a Voice in the Workplace

Here are six ways you can foster creativity and promote experimentation in your company:

1. Inspire your staff to share their ideas. Make sure your employees feel included in this process by welcoming their creative solutions. Find strategies you can use to encourage inclusion in the workplace.

2. Test out new ideas in small, controlled environments, almost like a science experiment. You should adequately document every stage of the process and evaluate the benefits of specific changes concerning your main goal. By doing this, you can see your ideas in action and determine if they are worth implementing on a large scale.

3. Make your goals for change clear, so people know where to start with their ideas. If staff understand the end goal and how you want to transform the company, they will likely be more focused on helping you achieve that goal. People drive change, and no one person can do it alone.

4. Devote time and resources to your experimentation. If you want profound change, you have to get serious about how much time and resources you are willing to devote to experimenting. Significant change requires a big effort on your part.

5. Identify the small changes that can result in significant gains. Sometimes, lots of little changes, which might not seem like much individually, can collectively push forward massive progress in your company. Make sure you take the time to recognize the success of little changes and keep in mind that some experimentation can be small-scale but with a strategic impact.

6. Document everything so you can replicate what worked and avoid what didn’t. Document each experimentation so that your team can easily replicate it if it’s successful. Doing so makes it easier to facilitate a change, especially if a particular process has detailed instructions based on a previously documented success. Change is most straightforward when you’ve created replicable systems.

Creativity and experimentation are most effective when shaped into tools that actively generate solutions. By creating an environment that nurtures strategic experimentation, you allow everyone to contribute to change, which invites new ideas and perspectives that you may not have considered before. Investing the resources to develop these ideas into relevant procedures and systems can have a substantial effect on your company’s direction and profits.

Your company is always growing and changing. Encouraging experimentation is a necessary part of being successful and adaptable. Taking these steps to promote change can allow you to focus on your company’s future growth and the values and ideas you want to be central to this transformation.