Change matters. The speed of change matters. Don’t change for change’s sake.  How to sort through it all?

Change matters and can be successfully and intelligently integrated into your lifestyle and work habits by answering three quick questions:

• Do you know your peak performance times?
• Are you prototyping for progress?
• Will you pilot the change?

Knowing your personal peak performance times is HUGE.  You should know this for yourself and your team. You can time your day to optimize your performance and introduce change intelligently to you and your organization. For example, if you know that your least favorite task is number-crunching, do your administrative tasks earlier in the day when you are fresh and less likely to make mistakes.  Daniel Pink has written a wonderful book on the topic, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

Next, proactively allocate some time, energy and resources to prototyping technologies. Most of the advances in productivity in the last 50 years have come from technological innovation.  What new app or device is out there that can help speed you through your day?

Third, pilot the change. Don’t look to change things for everybody just because you tested that cool new app or you heard a cool, new sound bite at a conference. Slow down to gain speed later, and make sure that the something is scalable and useful beyond just your personal ideation.

Piloting for success requires you to go with one test pilot, and self-pilots don’t count.  That will ensure that you secure the necessary feedback loop to make the change right by the customer or the client. Then add a second. At this point you’ll be much more prepared to scale the change to 10, 100 or even a 1,000 cars or customers.