Nathan Broslawsky's Blog

Regardless of your position, tenure, or role in an organization, one of the best ways to stretch yourself into new growth opportunities and demonstrate your value is to tackle a known issue (or bring to light a less known issue) in a new and innovative way. This could be an improvement to an existing business or operational process, or it could be the introduction of a new technique or tool. Regardless, no matter what solution you come up with, trying to drive change within an organization always starts with getting people to do something different than they’re used to doing.

Fortunately, the playbook for this first step is pretty well-trodden and simple: start small. Break down your larger objective into a smaller pilot that you can run with a group willing to pilot it with you. And it’s likely you’ve already identified them: you probably already have a close working relationship with them, have worked with them before, or they are already bought into your idea and are already invested in its success. For all of these reasons, it probably won’t be hard to convince them to get onboard. And, if you’re lucky, there might even be a few more groups lining up to help pilot it as soon as the initial group is done.

Ideally, you’d share your results, and everyone around the organization would see it and be lining up to follow along, right? However, remember you chose your first group(s) because they were already bought into your idea. They didn’t need that much convincing. And just because you have a successful outcome from your pilot now doesn’t mean people are ready to adopt a new way of doing things just because you’ve demonstrated that it’s objectively better.

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