Change management: does a successful pilot justify a wider rollout?
Before rolling out a change, organisations often test it with a volunteer team receiving substantial support. The management question is precise: does that success tell us about the proposed solution, or mainly about the exceptional conditions of its trial?
What the literature establishes
Jerker Denrell (2003, Organization Science) shows through theoretical analysis how the underrepresentation of failures in observed experience can generate misleading beliefs about the factors behind success. Observing only organisations or practices that have survived does not isolate what explains their performance. Applied to change pilots, this mechanism suggests examining discontinued trials and teams excluded from testing, rather than only the results presented.
Learning from a case without turning it into proof
James G. March, Lee S. Sproull and Michal Tamuz (1991, Organization Science) analyse how organisations can learn when experiences are rare or even unique. They highlight, among other things, the value of examining multiple interpretations of the same event rather than treating its outcome as a sufficient explanation. A pilot therefore becomes more informative when the support received, incidents and workarounds are documented alongside its final results.
The premature conclusion
The convenient conclusion would be that a favourable pilot authorises rollout, while an unfavourable one rules the change out. These studies instead encourage a distinction between the observed outcome and the conditions that made it possible. A volunteer team with direct access to the designers may establish that a solution is feasible without demonstrating that it is viable with ordinary resources. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These articles are not experimental evaluations of change management pilots and provide no universal threshold for wider rollout. In practice, selecting an available or highly skilled team is not necessarily a mistake: it may help identify flaws in the proposed solution. The limitation arises when this selection disappears from the report and the pilot conditions are implicitly assumed to apply to every team.
A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, an exercise in SHR's « Conduite du changement » programme can start with a real project in a medtech company, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region. Before the trial, record an operational success criterion and a ceiling for support, then measure the hours of assistance actually required per case handled by the pilot team and by a team working under ordinary conditions. Comparing support records and outcomes against the same criterion makes it possible to check whether success remains observable outside the pilot's privileged conditions, without claiming that this comparison alone establishes causality. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Lausanne
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