Change management: should a trial be judged by its immediate returns?
When an organisation tests a new way of working, it often expects it to outperform the previous approach immediately. The management question is specific: how can a trial be evaluated without prematurely discarding a useful option or prolonging an unproductive experiment?
What the literature establishes
James G. March (1991, Organization Science) distinguishes the exploitation of existing knowledge from the exploration of new possibilities. His model shows how learning can favour activities with more immediate and predictable returns, at the expense of options whose benefits remain uncertain or delayed. For change management, this suggests that an established practice and a trial should not be compared as though they shared the same learning history.
The mechanism: learning to prefer the familiar
Daniel A. Levinthal and James G. March (1993, Strategic Management Journal) analyse a myopia of learning: organisations may overlook distant time horizons, remote settings and failures. Learning from experience is therefore not necessarily an impartial corrective; it can reinforce established preferences. An assessment confined to immediately visible returns can consequently mistake familiarity for superiority.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every experiment should be shielded from demands for results. These studies do not justify such leniency: exploration consumes resources, while exploiting existing knowledge remains essential. The useful distinction is between two evaluation criteria: the operational result achieved and the uncertainty actually reduced. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these studies cannot determine
These articles primarily offer modelling and theoretical analysis, not an optimal experiment duration validated for every sector. They neither quantify an acceptable performance decline nor establish that a disappointing trial will necessarily produce a later benefit. In practice, invoking learning without specifying the question being tested makes an experiment almost impossible to challenge.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR's “Change Management” programme, an exercise applicable in Sion is to prepare a trial brief that separates operational results from expected learning before the trial begins. Whether the trial concerns hydropower maintenance planning, healthcare service coordination, grape-harvest organisation or Alpine tourism reception services, it should specify a hypothesis, a comparison baseline, a review date and non-negotiable safety or quality limits. At the review date, calculate the proportion of initial hypotheses for which observations support a conclusion, favourable or unfavourable, and retain the evidence for each. This clarification rate should be read alongside the operational result, never in its place: a disproved hypothesis can inform a decision without making harm acceptable. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Sion
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