Leaders act as coaches for their teams on applying Scientific Thinking as the way of delivery. Scientific Thinking is about teams designing and doing small steps (aka experiments) following the next points:
– Reality of the step-up, technology, requirements, solution complexity, and more.
– Team Target: to guide the steps towards what the team aspires for.
– Results and Reflections from the previous step to inform the designing and doing of the next step.
By acting as coaches, leaders unlock teams and individuals to figure-out solutions to business problems that cannot be mandated top-down. When leaders become coaches for their teams on Scientific Thinking, the following desired behaviors would emerge.
1. Psychological safety: When leaders frame the work as experiments, automatically teams will feel safety to talk about issues that are unsafe to discuss if they were top-down directed. This behavior mitigates preventable failures that are very expensive to solve with no meaningful learning.
2. Grit: It’s the combination of perseverance and passion that would allow teams to achieve challenging objectives. By daily experimenting and applying small steps in their way to a target they established, teams have direction to guide them on their daily improvement and steps. The very act of having daily small steps nourish teams’ progress.
3. Growth mindset: Teams are always in the mod of learning about new solutions to ever-increasing challenges. No prescribed solutions we can create today that will help with tomorrow’s challenges. Teams are more open to learn to grow their skills in the way needed to solve novel problems, that increasingly became the norm.
4. Growing talents: Talents are not innate; they are not limited to the prodigies. Rather, talents are grown through deliberate practice with the support of a coach.
5. Empowerment: It happens when teams are given the conditions that allow them to figure-out their solutions.
Kata School Midwest 