Author of “The Experimental Leader”

Melanie is a speaker, consultant, workshop leader, author, and Master Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation, in which she received the Prism Award. Melanie has consulted and operated within organizations ranging from a Fortune 50 company to IT start-ups within their first round of funding.

Many of Melanie’s innovations surrounding business outline science and a need for experimentation and data collection.

Melanie says, “When we have a status quo that we want to change, we start to try things and we start to experiment. I’ve noticed in organizations that what happens traditionally with people’s careers is they live and die by ideas. We’ve all been on a team where someone had an idea and they invested a ton of money, but the idea didn’t work out. Then that leader loses credibility in the organization. When we adopt in leadership an experimental culture, we start to think of experimenting in something we all buy into together.”

In today’s corporate environment we are demanding innovation.

  • The beauty of an experiment is playing as you go and deciding how much you want to invest up-front.
  • We’re just trying to prove the concept, and Melanie provides us with practical application.
  • Melanie says, “That explicit awareness that you’ve asked people to spend their lives working for you, for the organization, and to pay attention to what they’re doing and to hold that curiosity deeply about what they’re doing. Then, to help support them to help do their bottleneck so they can do it better.”

Are we truly supporting our upcoming leaders with innovative techniques such as Melanie’s?

  • Experimentation in business seems to possess a certain kind of togetherness and risk.
  • A hypothesis that we can all buy into together, and if we fail, the next experiment begins. Ideas like these inspire creativity by informing the corporate audience that this is a process in trial and error rather than immediate gratification.

Other resources referenced in this episode:

  • Theory of Constraints a process improvement methodology of Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt that emphasizes the importance of the system constraint or “bottleneck.”

 

Click here to listen the podcast episode: https://www.pureentelechy.com/podcast/experimental-leader-melanie-parish/