London Business School Developing Effective Managers and Organization Paper

Take any lesson or insight or technique from DEMO and run a ‘what if’ experiment at work.

Choose any of one of our course lessons—e.g., self-fulfilling prophecies, deepening engagement, creating psychological safety, reinforcing culture through rituals and rewards, among others—and apply it at work. For more on the power of experiments: https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/forget-about-the-10-000-hour-rule-7b7a39343523 (Links to an external site.)

Time 1                                                                                                                   Time 2     

            |________________________________________________________________________|

         Situation with                                       INTERVENTION                                      Effect of

       predictable behaviors                                                                                           intervention

     reactions, ideas, actions        

Your write-up of your experiment serves as the assessment.

1. Specify the purpose of your experiment (e.g., to deepen engagement in your group, to create greater inclusion on your team, to shift a report’s behaviour).
2. Note your hypothesis: ‘If, then’ statements work well for this. Be clear about what you did and what specific outcomes you are looking for (e.g., timely work completion, quieter voices speaking up in meetings, evidence of improved morale, etc). Example of hypotheses:
   1. If I engage in more positive behaviours with my report, she will submit work that is more complete and contains fewer errors
   2. If I add two more higher-level responsibilities to my team, other observers will see evidence of a boost in the team’s morale.
   3. If I provide less specific instructions to my report for more mundane tasks, he will have a more positive attitude at work.
3. Briefly describe what specific actions you took.
4. Analyse the effects of your experiment by comparing typical (i.e., pre-experiment) experience—what typically happens in this situation—with what happened as a consequence of conducting the experiment. This analysis is the heart of the paper as it is here you describe the results of your experiment. Include:
   1. What were the effects of the intervention on the intended target’s behaviour and demeanor?
   2. How did the results of the experiment shift your attitudes or challenge your assumptions?
   3. If the results of your experiment did not turn out the way you had expected, explain why this might be.