How Tiny Experiments Strengthen Every Part of Planning

Aug 28

How are you?

Over here, the kids are back in school. Fall isn’t quite here yet – but it’s coming -- I even noticed some pumpkin decorations at the store 🤷. Destructiveness and attacks by the Federal regime continue – we want to celebrate and amplify the millions of Americans who are protesting and resisting.

We’re continuing our series on the practices of thriving nonprofit organizations by exploring Testing and Tiny Experiments:

Doing well was a way to get attention

I didn’t start out as someone who was open to Tiny Experiments. Growing up, school success created attention that caused me to feel special and loved. And something else happened too: as much as I was successful, I had very high standards for myself. Everything had to be perfect.

You can imagine how this worked out.

I had so much anxiety about failing – and so much of my ego tied up in being outstanding – that every semester, I lived in fear that I was going to “fail.” I wouldn’t fail though – I would continue to do very well in the end.

Perfectionism came with avoiding risks

From the outside, I looked successful. I was a strong student.

The problem was that this success came with avoiding risks. In college, I was too scared to try courses that I might not do well in. I was interested in sociology, but I didn’t take the Introduction to Sociology course because some classmates said it was hard. Later, I dreamed of being a journalist, but I didn’t pursue it because it seemed too risky.

I went along like that for many years, moving from one position to another, mostly in my comfort zone.

“Failure” was freeing.

What happened was that I “failed”: I was fired from (what I thought was) my dream job. My world was turned upside down. My identity as a successful person was questioned. As I’ve written, it felt horrible.

I started from scratch: I questioned what I thought worked and reflected on how I might work in a different way. That moment of failure involved acknowledging how imperfect I was – and how imperfect and human – we all are.

But after moving through the hard feelings, this failure became freeing. I didn’t have to get everything right any more. I could take more risks and live from a more experimental place.

ID: Three testing tubes - two blue and one orange with bubbles, on a blue table with a blue background

Using Tiny Experiments to build a consulting firm

We have not built The Ross Collective with a master plan -- but rather with Tiny Experiments.

What are Tiny Experiments? In the Cal State East Bay Nonprofit Consulting course, one of the key ideas is to conduct “tiny experiments,” which we define as follows:

Try something small that feels promising, energizing, and exciting
Reflect on how that worked
Get feedback from others
Make improvements and keep doing that if it is working
If it is not working, go back to step #1

That’s it!

We use Tiny Experiments to improve facilitation

Here’s an example of how we use Tiny Experiments to improve facilitation: Many years ago we started leading nonprofit board retreats and strategic planning retreats. We tested different objectives and activities until we found a formula for the board retreat and the strategic planning retreat that is the foundation of the retreats we lead now.

Even though we have a proven formula that has worked with many organizations, we still meet with a Design Team (the strategic planning committee) to get their feedback on the agenda and make sure that the conversations we propose will work for this specific group.

How you do Tiny Experiments is as important as what you do

Through working with clients to do Tiny Experiments and doing them ourselves, we encourage all to bring curiosity.

In other words, there is a difference between saying, “We have to get this right!” and saying, “What’s going to happen if we try this?”

Curiosity creates expansiveness. It allows people to come together and “play” at coming up with solutions. Tiny Experiments are energizing. (If you want to read more about this idea, we’re big fans of this book, which focuses on individual experiments and can be applied to the organizational context as well.)

It also makes sense for our times. We are trying to solve complex challenges, some that the human race has never seen before, with multiple causes. There is no “manual” to tell us what to do. A spirit of experimentation is needed.

What are your Tiny Experiments?

What about you – what Tiny Experiments have you conducted, and what has the result been?

Or, even better – here are a series of Tiny Experiments that I would like to challenge you with! The following is just a list - I’m happy to provide more detail if you ask, the reason behind what I’m thinking. Honestly, my reason isn’t important, yours is.

BUT! Here’s the deal, if you run one of these Tiny Experiments (or your own inspired Tiny Experiment), then you have to share it with me. At least me, even better if you tag me and/or The Ross Collective with the description on your socials (you can find The Ross Collective on LinkedIn, or find me on LinkedIn). May we all be brave enough to fail forward!

Create a list of five possible new board members. Then work on asking them to join your board.
Ask for reviews of your nonprofit from your closest friends and followers
Send a personal handwritten note to your largest donors thanking them for their donations in the last three years
Run a flash campaign to start September
Test something new on your website (donation button or call to action)
Send a video update about three of the best things that has happened to the organization so far this year to your email list
Add your own!

Just know that we want to hear what you end up doing. We hope you’re inspired by this to take action – start with a little bit of curiosity so you can make your own Tiny Experiment. Let’s see what you can accomplish!

Note - this is part 4 of a five-part series on practices for thriving nonprofit organizations: