One of the reasons change is hard, is because you’ll never know if a change works out in advance. That’s what makes it so much fun.

After writing about change, Henrik shared the Small Uncontrolled Experiments approach with me. It is targeted at product teams, but I can imagine it working for all kinds of situations where multiple people work together with a shared goal.

The gist of it:

• Collect proposed changes in a shared location. Anyone in the team can propose changes.
• Changes are as small, low cost and low risk.
• A change has a clear end date.
• Anyone can stop the change.
• When discussing the change, the discussion is not about if it works, but “Will we try this? For how long? Can we make it even smaller so it will take less effort and won’t influence our velocity?”. Reasoning is that a change will prove or disprove itself. It doesn’t need discussion.

There are a couple of great examples in the post mentioned before.

Thanks for sharing, Henrik, and I’m looking forward to try out changing small things using this method.