There’s never been more information available to small and medium business owners keen to improve their operations. Books, podcasts, blogs and LinkedIn posts offer entrepreneurs an endless array of possible solutions to their problems, based on established and evolving wisdom.
But while these resources encourage owners to look within the business world for answers, what if they ventured beyond and drew inspiration from science instead?
Leadership coach Tamsin Simounds has been working with leaders and founders for a decade, but says her early career as a radiographer is fundamental to her advice. When transitioning to a corporate environment, she noticed core scientific concepts – like experimentation – were not just lacking but, in some cases, were actively avoided. Leaders were quick to set goals but reluctant to move towards them.
In her book, The Experiment Mindset, she urges entrepreneurs to test their way to growth, noting that agile small and medium businesses are the perfect laboratories. “There’s so many experiments that you can run,” she says. “It’s just understanding where am I now, what do I actually want, and what’s my best experiment that’s going to take me where I want to go?”
Leaders Are Spending More But Thriving Less
As an author, Simounds believes self-help resources are valuable – but not if they gather dust or are filed away once consumed.
“Learning, podcasts and books have become a really high-quality procrastination tool,” she claims. “For those high achievers among us, it can feel like we’re progressing when we pick up the next book or we learn a new thing, but we’re not actually moving at all.”
She notes research estimating US$60 billion is spent globally each year on personal development training yet the theory is generally not put into practice, with serious consequences.
“Our state of thriving in the workplace, it’s declining year on year,” Simounds notes. “It’s gone the other way. So, all of that information we have is not translating to outcomes and that’s a significant gap.”
The gap between knowing and doing, and the endless appetite for advice, can also be blamed on perfectionism, Simounds argues. She says the growing obsession with perfection has been well documented over the past three decades, fuelled in part by social media.
“It’s easy to think that we can’t move until we’ve got our plan fully formed, or that we’ve got all of the information that we need to learn, but again, that’s not how progress works,” Simounds says.
The real mechanism for change, she believes, is far less straightforward. “Progress works from iteration, from taking some action, learning through it, adapting, and then taking that next step.”
Human Brains Prefer Friction To Theory
Simounds recalls, early in her coaching career, encountering clients who had developed 2- or 5-year plans but hadn’t stuck to them. They’d been forced to stray from strategy but hadn’t tried to get back on track or update the plan, creating a gap between where they were and where they wanted to be. “There was also a gap between what people know and what they’re actually doing, so I set about researching how we bridge that gap,” she says.
She found the problem was rooted in science: a conflict between how humans learn and the way they run businesses. “We know from a neuroscience standpoint that we don’t learn in a way that allows us to change our behaviour just from reading,” she explains. “We learn and update from the friction that comes with trying something that we’ve never tried before, and that discomfort, or that coming up against something we didn’t expect to happen, that’s how we actually change.”
Simounds points out that scientists routinely expect the unexpected, enabling adaptability. “When I went to study the brain, I found out that there is a mechanism, a biological mechanism, for experimentation,” she adds. Yet traditional business thinking is often outcome-driven and geared towards strict metrics.
“When we’re setting people up to need to hit their KPIs or get a project right, we’re enhancing these needs over the need to learn over time and adapt, which is the skill that we need people to have for the future of work,” she says.
She says while business has clung to this approach, professional sport has moved on after finding outcome-focused coaching decreased results and mental wellbeing. “We haven’t adapted, but sport did, so we’ve just got a little bit of catching up to do,” Simounds adds.
The Value Of Having An Experimental Mindset
Simounds acknowledges the pressure on small business owners to ‘get things right,’ when the stakes are high and they feel responsible for their employees’ livelihoods. Her advice to clients to experiment can be met with initial fear and resistance.
But she counters by pointing out that their size makes small businesses the perfect place to test ideas. “ It can be easier to do it on a small scale than to try and do it on a big team,” she insists. “It is an immediately implementable way of testing change before we go all in.”
Even failures are valuable. “If we are only doing successful experiments, we’re not really experimenting, are we?” Simounds asks. “We’re probably just testing what we already know, rather than stretching the boundaries of our understanding.”
Deciding what to test requires reflection and intention, rather than ‘throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it’s fixed.’ Simounds says getting to the heart of an issue often means addressing smaller, upstream obstacles first. “It’s really acting like a scientist and going deep and doing the research first on, okay, what’s really going on here, and then testing and learning as we go.”
To help with reflection, Simounds offers what she calls the Three Levers of Change, which drive behaviour and are closely linked to culture: environment (people, places and prompts), physiology (physical safety and wellbeing) and psychology (thoughts, beliefs and identity)
Problems that need solving will generally fall under one of these levers. “Which is going to be the one that we can pull that is going to most easily make the change in the direction that we’re wanting to go?” she suggests asking.
Putting The Scientific Approach To The Test
Simounds believes no experiment is too small to make a difference. In many cases, smaller experiments work best, because they’re doable. “Bring it back to the tiniest step that you can take that is going to get you on the way to where it is that you’re wanting to go.”
She recommends leaders put hypotheses in writing, documenting what they want to test, what they hope to learn and, importantly, the duration, so that it doesn’t roll on indefinitely without the impact being measured. Essentially, “I’ll test [X] for [Y duration] to learn [Z].”
Experiments relating to the first lever of change, environment, can attempt to shift behaviour by targeting external inputs. These may include:
- put a phone in focus mode for an hour a day to test productivity
- have coffee with each team member once a week to see if it builds connection
- use an AI tool to analyse emails to test whether it saves time
- expand professional networks by having one meeting a week for four weeks
For the second lever, physiology, experiments could be designed to address stress energy levels. That may be testing whether an employee has the ability to step up and take on leadership duties that free up the owner, or whether an experimental stint in a different role could benefit a worker’s wellbeing.
The third lever, psychology, involves challenging perfectionism and internal narratives. It may be small, like testing the impact of posting twice weekly on LinkedIn, even when posts are not perfect or polished. Or, an experiment could provide the evidence needed when making big decisions. Simounds gives the example of an SME client who tested her commitment to her own business by taking a sabbatical, with time away confirming her suspicion she was ready to step aside and pursue other passions.
By encouraging business owners to put experimentation to the test, Simounds hopes they’ll be convinced to stop thinking about making a change and, in the words of Nike, just do it. “We want to lead our small businesses in a way that makes them feel safe and secure,” she says, “but if we shift the way that we’re doing things, we can save ourselves a lot of wasted time and money.”
