Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love by Richard Sheridan

Author:Richard Sheridan [Sheridan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-12-25T14:00:00+00:00

Incrementally Change a Current Process and Give It Time

A big part of the joy in running small experiments is that you don’t have to make a final decision on anything right away. This is different from ambiguity, when people on the team are never sure whether a decision has been made and, if so, what the decision is. In this case, we are unambiguously modifying a part of our process, but also reserving the right to unambiguously change our mind later if things aren’t working.

The Wilmut project is one of our biggest projects to date. The work involves designing and developing software for an FDA-validated medical diagnostic device. We routinely have more than twenty people on this project. During weekly project kickoff sessions, we walk through all the planned cards together before each pair starts working on its assigned cards. With Wilmut, the team struggled with having so many people working together and so many cards to get through, so we ran a few different experiments intended to improve the kickoffs.

Some team members weren’t excited about the different ideas, such as splitting the project team into two separate groups of ten people each during kickoff and discussing a subset of the cards in each group. The team removed the fear of these changes by suggesting we try something for a week or two and reflect on the results. We could always do something else if we really didn’t like how it worked out. Our team is willing to try an experiment if some members on the team are passionate about it. We don’t need to have full buy-in just to start an experiment.

Another team member further reinforced this notion by saying we should do the same thing for at least two to three weeks in a row before making any judgments on how the experiment had gone. To truly run an experiment, you need to try something out more than once, because at first—no matter what you try—it will probably be bumpy.

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