Trojan Mice

I remember reading Homer's The Iliad the first time and expecting that the famous Trojan Horse would play a major role in the story.  If you are not familiar with the story, The Iliad tells the story of the 10-year siege of Troy by the Greeks.  The book ends before the war does, so the story of the Trojan Horse doesn't even get mentioned!  As a matter of fact, the story of the Trojan Horse is only briefly mentioned at the beginning of Homer's The Odyssey.  It's actually discussed more in Virgil's epic The Aeneid.  As the legend goes, the Greeks have grown tired of fighting the Trojans, so they come up with a rather unique plan to win the war.  They construct a giant wooden horse and hide their men inside, while the rest of their army leaves.  The Trojans wake up one morning and find that the Greeks have left.  They see the giant horse and unwittingly bring the horse inside the city walls.  Later that night, the Greek soldiers hidden inside the horse emerge and open the gates, allowing the rest of the Greek army to enter the city and win the battle.

The "Trojan Horse" has become a metaphor for any person, thing, or strategy that is being used to hide the true intent or purpose.  For example, a "Trojan Horse" can be a computer virus ("malware") that gains access to a system by appearing to be harmless initially and ultimately causing significant damage to the system itself.  Well, apparently there is now something called a "Trojan Mouse" that describes how organizations "run small, light, nimble experiments - tests not to win wars, but rather to quickly infiltrate new territory, attack new problems, and inform future tactics."  They include small, limited change initiatives that are designed to build capacity, learn, and inform subsequent organization-wide transformational change initiatives.

As Harold Jarche describes them, "Trojan mice are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way."  The power and utility of conducting these small, limited, and focused "tests of change" is that they limit and diversify the risks involved with larger, more sweeping changes.  

Jackie Mahendra of the Stanford Social Innovation Review says that "unless we're willing to experiment, we can't expect big breakthroughs.  One way to do that - to make risk more approachable - is to run small tests.  To build something that isn't necessarily grand, but rather light, lean, and quick - experiments that we can send off nimbly through the gates and learn from, regardless of what returns.  A Trojan Mouse instead of a Trojan Horse."

Those of us who focus on continuous quality improvement will certainly recognize and appreciate this metaphor of using "Trojan Mice" to initiate transformational organizational change.  We probably just didn't recognize that we were using "Trojan Mice"!  Whether we call them "Trojan Mice" or "PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) ramps", the concept is to start small, learn, and progressively increase the size and scope of the change efforts to continuously improve the entire organization.