Ep. 17 - How To Know If A Change Is Working Or Just… Different
One of the most disorientating things about changing how you run your business is that “new” and “better” feel almost identical in the early stages.
You’ve changed how things work and everything feels unfamiliar. There are moments of smoothness and moments of chaos and you truly can’t tell whether you’re moving in the right direction or just moving.
This is a real problem, because business owners who can’t tell if something is working tend to do one of two things: abandon good changes too early, or stick with bad ones too long. Neither is great.
The problem with judging change too early and too late
Most people assess a change at the wrong moment. Either immediately after making it, when everything is still adjusting and nothing looks conclusive, or months later, when they’ve lost track of what they were even trying to fix.
Two weeks in, almost every change looks like it might not be working, because two weeks is not enough time for new patterns to settle. You’re still in the adjustment phase, and adjustment is inherently messy.
Six months in, if you haven’t been paying attention, it’s very hard to unpick what the change actually did. The picture has too many other variables in it.
The sweet spot for honest evaluation is usually around six weeks; long enough for the dust to settle, recent enough that the change is still the main variable.
What ‘working’ actually looks like in the messy middle
Meaningful improvement rarely looks like a clean before and after. It looks more like:
Slightly fewer of the same questions or problems landing in your inbox
A task completing without you having to nudge it along
A client interaction that went smoothly because your new approach did its job
A decision you made once and didn’t need to revisit
Small things that are easy to dismiss, but they’re the early signals that the change is doing what it was supposed to do.
The questions worth asking at different stages
At two weeks: are you actually working differently, even imperfectly? Or are you reverting to the old way on autopilot? These are different problems: One is adjustment, t’other is a sign something needs redesigning.
At six weeks: has the volume of things landing back on your plate changed? Are decisions happening faster? Is the new approach becoming the default rather than a conscious effort?
At three months: how does your energy around this area compare to before? Does the work feel lighter, even marginally? Are there fewer fires in this specific part of the business?
You’re not looking for dramatic transformation at any of these points. You’re looking for directional movement.
Leading indicators vs lagging indicators
Most business owners focus on lagging indicators such as revenue, client retention, delivery quality, because these are the things that eventually prove whether something worked. The problem is they take time, and they’re influenced by a lot of factors beyond the one change you made.
Leading indicators are the earlier signals: your own behaviour, the volume of things that route back to you, how often you’ve overridden the new way and fallen back on the old one, your energy levels around a particular area of the work.
These won’t give you certainty. But they’ll give you direction. And direction is what you need when you’re six weeks into something new and trying to decide whether to keep going.
Trusting your nervous system as data
This one gets left out of most business advice, so I’m putting it in: if things feel lighter, that counts.
Not as the only data point, but as a real one. Your nervous system registers change before your spreadsheet does. If you’re sleeping better, dreading Monday a bit less, not spending Sunday evening in a low hum of anxiety about the week ahead … well then something is shifting in the right direction.
Take stock! You’re probably further along than you think.
If you’d like help reading the signals more clearly and figuring out what to do next, that’s exactly what a discovery call is for.
