A recent correspondent asked how to move his team from “thoughts and fears about plans” to action, and I suggestion making their next intervention a pilot. That way an intervention is an experiment, and can be evaluated, then continued, tweaked, or ended.
I counseled him to consider coaching folks to articulate
- the problem we see
- the result we want
- what we’ll try, for how long
- how we will know if it is working or not
- how we will know if we should stop the pilot early
At the end of the pilot you can evaluate the results and decide to
- continue as-is
- continue with tweaks
- try something else
- stop altogether
with the same five points above for any change or new intervention.