1000&1 solutions : A test and learn approach dedicated to the company’s transformation

To carry out a new project several times without ever meeting, to reorganize the pace of its day by ensuring that its production and well-being are balanced, to take part in a video meeting with two young children, to test a new digital tool, to invent other modes of communication, etc., containment in many respects resembles a full-scale experiment that creates numerous individual, collective and institutional experiments within it.

We began testing this approach a year ago in a modest way: first with 200 people and then 700, on objects that are relatively unattractive to business, with modest means in terms of ambition, and in a move context that is more conducive to rejection than enthusiastic membership.

A year later, the first figures from our evaluation are promising. 71% of employees who initiated or participated in an experiment stress that this enabled them to optimise their cognitive abilities (experiments around concentration, recovery, work organisation, etc.), 40% that it helped them to develop more appropriate individual and collective working methods, 59% that it helped to improve the quality of interpersonal exchanges and user-friendliness, or 83% that it led them to improve collaboration and information sharing. Some of the figures highlight the virtues of experimentation.

This approach, thought in vitro and conceived in vivo, echoes a fundamental trend observed over the last few years in relation to experimentation: sandbox, prototyping, trial-error, etc., practices which take over from the triptych-based “prescription/control/sanction” approaches characteristic of the “old world”. It must be said that transformation through experimentation has virtues that are to say the least respectable: organic, slow, inclusive, agile, collaborative, creative, responsible.

We propose to develop further in this article the foundations and framework for the transformation of a large enterprise based on “management through experimentation” in the post-Covid era19. For more than ever, the world that is opening invites us to experiment.

In this context of profound change, we are increasingly convinced that models must be abandoned. This is precisely the originality of the productive revolution we are about to experience. We leave a model without knowing what the next model will look like, or even whether the notion of model will still make sense. The methods and modes of action that we used to accompany the transformation of organisations (the so-called “change management”) seem to us totally inadequate, even if habits last a long time. Indeed, we believe that experimentation is a powerful lever for building the world that is opening up to us, provided it is truly installed, explored in all its dimensions and accepted its limitations.

Of course, we'll have to replenish reserves to prepare for the hard times and invest in new projects. But rebuilding reserves by doing what we have always done is the best way to go round in circles.

Experimenting does not mean “having fun trying to see” or, worse, playing sorcerer’s apprentices. This is a luxury we cannot afford. Experimentation involves following certain rules.

What does "experiment" really mean?

Experimenting means moving forward by trial and error, modestly and empirically. We even think that it could become a fruitful approach to considering work organisation because it carries within it the DNA of resilience that we will increasingly need in the years to come. Experimenting invites a willingness to act even if all the conditions are not met. Of course, not everything can be tested. The costs incurred, the risks, and even the dangers that may arise, remain obvious arbitration keys.

But if experimentation in the early 1920’s led to the idea of acting without being constrained by a specific outcome a priori, the situation is different today. In companies whose reserves have melted, with a production apparatus which is slow and social tensions liable to create rifts here and there, some precautions must be taken.

Experimenting involves discussing what is expected of it. Of course, it takes a little time, but it creates commitment by bringing meaning and social connection. In this discussion, intuition will be in order, but it should not crush the admittedly limited rationality that will support the expected value. Basically, the discussion that feeds on what one seeks to experiment must lead to the emergence of a 50/50. 50% of KPI’s obeying [1]a form of rationality, and 50% of the unexpected resulting from an intuition that was not measured in advance, or even sometimes formalized. Of course, there is no certified balance to ensure this. It is up to those who are willing to support it. And monitor its effects, especially after the event, when the consequences become significant.

Experimenting also requires constant regulation, adjustment and correction of what is being tested to ensure that experimentation produces the expected value. And give up if necessary… The challenge is not to seek to optimise mass production through gains in productivity, cost or time, but to gain in creativity, in the rapidity of setting up a new idea, a project conceived on a corner of a table, and in collective intelligence as well.

Experimenting is necessarily part of a bottom-up approach. In this, it takes us away from top-down approaches, which are being sought precisely because of their cumbersome implementation. Experimenting involves working as closely as possible to adapt to the consequences produced. While experimentation has been decided at the top – which can still be an attractive asset for success – it is important to negotiate open, flexible, grassroots implementation methods that can evolve over time.

We have often underestimated how the will to continue to control the hazard could slow down or even prevent experimentation, even if the negative consequences could be derisory. By habit, because you don’t take the time to objectify or even just talk about it, because you don’t see where it can lead, because you have to get them somehow into existing processes, subject them to hierarchical and functional validation, many experiments have been blocked.

Finally, experimentation does not necessarily mean "generalizing" if it works. Any attempt to generalize will require some precautions in the conduct of change. For experimentation generates, above all, resilience by promoting the right to error, imagination, openness, agility, adjustment, discretion, flexibility, envy, etc., makes, above all, resilience, which will enable organizations to survive crises, seize opportunities, and reinvent themselves where social, economic, and environmental developments demand it.

Why experiment?

First, because it is totally premature to propose a model, at the risk of reproducing the pitfalls of the one we are now seeking to overcome (top-down, hierarchical, programmatic, mechanical, Covid, famine of time, fragility of a world in flux, one-sided and narrow approach to the notion of value… post Covid). The usual paradigms of learning, thinking, and work are being profoundly shaken by digital technology, and even more so since the experience of confining half the planet.

And we may be at the beginning. Endless acceleration of information, cognitive abstraction in large parts of the economy, mass destruction of jobs, ultra-rapid development of companies whose financial weight has exceeded certain nations in a few years... But the list of dislocations also seems endless: the state is once again in the saddle, the planet is visibly breathing, social reorganization is in the making, and geopolitical balances are upset. What strikes us is that all paths seem possible, from the most obscurantist to the most progressive, from the most improbable to the most obvious. Without going into chaos theory, we believe it is urgent, in this context, not to rush to propose a stable model. On the contrary, in these times of great instability, the capacity of our organizations to evolve, adjust and transform is more than ever a priority. But we really need to empower people who produce on a daily basis.

Experimentation is a powerful mode of action in this regard. To try, to make mistakes, to take a different path, to see that it works, to become more flexible so as not to repeat its mistakes, all of which are micro-actions carried by collectives and which we are betting will help to build other growth models, both small and large.

For it is a whole system that must be moved, and quickly, and not just a component, without which the invisible architecture that has been built over time – process, rules, hierarchies, routines, power zones – will inevitably take over, that is the second reason for choosing experimentation. From this point of view, experimentation, by its very nature, proposes a global transformation movement that can affect all components of the system within a small perimeter, at a pace and in “natural” ways for part of the organization. Experimentation makes it possible to embrace this complexity by taking into account a microglobality. Action is not taken on the organization as a whole, but on individual fragments of it, assuming that they contain most, if not all, of the elements to be moved. Taken back to the company, this means that if you take a team, a service, a department or even a unit of location from a disparate whole, you can find the various elements that make up the system and are now caught in the grip of this invisible architecture that risks closing on us as a gangue from which you cannot escape. We refer here to management, employees, top management, trade union organisations, support functions and custodians of business and cross-functional processes and the environment (social, political, economic, ecological).

How to experiment?

So how can we experiment without doing anything? Without playing sorcerer's apprentice? Without taking the risk of acting where the consequences could be costly socially, economically or in terms of safety…? Especially since time is playing against us.

At first, we tried to define three conditions: a limited field of experimentation, an authorization to do differently backed by a frame of reference, and the need to really experiment, not to lose its meaning.

First, experimentation requires an understanding of the issues at stake in the business in which one operates: what are the priorities on which experiments should be carried out, the points of fragility to be taken into account in order not to act as apprentice witches, the constraints likely to prevent the success of certain experiments in fact, the resources that can be mobilised and their limits (foremost of which is the time and duration of the experiment).

Secondly, experimentation implies that we must simultaneously be at three levels: individual, collective and institutional. At the individual level, we will, for example, experiment with working earlier in the morning, working in one place more than another, testing a new method of operation to produce a document… At an intermediate level between the individual and the institution, at the level of a collective, we will experiment with, for example, standing 30-minute meetings, remote collaborations with a particular tool or principle, the abolition of intermediate validations… Finally, at the level of an organisation as a whole, we will decide, for example, to experiment with the abolition of the evaluation of individual performance, to define new rules for the use of spaces, to test another organisation of time…

Finally, experimentation does not mean trying everything or anything. The seven dimensions that structure work within a company – activity, time, space, collaboration, tools, contract and external relations – provide a useful framework for experimentation. For example, at each of the three levels just mentioned, one can delete an activity that seems to be of little use, rethink the way in which working time is organised, adapt the working space to its needs, test the autonomy of a collective in decision-making, usually at the higher level, try out a new tool for a few weeks, pool its resources with a few partners. We learned from experience that the real risk did not come from the whacky ideas of experimentation put forward by employees. When a group of employees is asked to come up with ideas for working in other ways, both in terms of how they do it and in terms of the nature of their work, the proposals initially appear to be rather disappointing, marked by conservatism and a lack of boldness. Because compliance logics are well entrenched, the challenge is less to contain the risk of “spillover” than to stimulate the possibility of thinking otherwise.

A final recommendation…

Experimentation could quickly become the faux-nose of a typical project-style change management of the past 20 years, with milestones, deliverables, KPIs and steering committees to ensure that everything goes according to plan. In all our experiments, we see employees starting to allow themselves to work differently. But very quickly, these same people point to the obstacles they face: processes, hierarchy, control, lack of time that prevent them from doing otherwise. It is normal, it is the very principle of experimentation, to point out what stands in the way of moving it. Decision-makers will need to move beyond 40 years of management to become truly leaders who can take risks by combining their usual frames of reference – prescription, control, and sanction – with a more organic, open, and vibrant approach.

 Monique BENAILY Head of RISK HR and Olivier CHARBONNIER DSides CEO

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