With summer now firmly in the rear view, companies are heading into the fourth quarter, which is typically a time for reviewing progress to date and wrapping up budgeting and reporting for year-end. However, we believe Q4 is a perfect time to run small-scale, low-investment experiments that can sharpen your strategy and increase your chances of achieving your corporate goals in 2025.
So, rather than crawling to the finish line, let’s look at what we mean by experimentation, why the end of the year is such a fantastic opportunity to start it, and practical tips for getting going.
What is experimentation?
Experimentation is about constantly testing, learning, and iterating, which gives you an ongoing feedback loop of the latest information. What sets cultures of experimentation apart from cultures of learning is that in the former there is an acceptance of the necessity of failure, a celebration of the lessons it provides, and an understanding that making mistakes is part of achieving any business objective.
Why is experimentation important?
- Improves your chances of achieving business outcomes
By relentlessly trying out ideas on a small scale, generating data, and improving as you go, you make your large strategic investments more likely to be successful. While this does involve accepting and even celebrating inevitable small-scale failures, experimenting with pilots in advance of implementing a new strategy, program, or project can help you mitigate risks and protect you from costlier mistakes at scale. It gives you greater confidence that your strategic execution can be done more smoothly and with greater impact, because you’ve proactively sought and received insights into what is likely to work and what isn’t.
- Quicker speed to market
If you experiment on a small scale and in a rapid way, you can get to market faster with new products and solutions because you’re not spending months and months researching and assessing your big investments, launching them, and hoping they pay off. Through always-on experimentation you’re collecting data in a much shorter time, which helps you accelerate into action. Indeed, sometimes successful experiments can yield early payoffs, improving financial performance ahead of expectations.
- Stay relevant to your customers
Regardless of who your customer is, whether external or internal, experimentation teaches you more about what they really need. If you’re not constantly engaging with your customers, there is a very real danger that you’ll make assumptions about what they want, and don’t want. But through testing ideas out on them, over shorter periods, you learn more about your customers, faster. This means you can respond quicker to their needs, course correct any mistakes, and remain relevant in an increasingly dynamic global market.
Why is Q4 the perfect time to experiment?
While organizations want to be delivering on their strategies year-round, the fourth quarter can often be a time for getting bogged down with administriva, including budgeting and planning for the year ahead. But we believe experimentation can be a game changer for your Q4, just as it was for this company, by helping you:
- Stay on strategy. Small-scale experiments are a terrific way to stay connected to your strategy, enabling your teams to focus on innovating and adding value right up to the final whistle.
- Get ahead of your goals for 2025. Getting a quarter’s worth of fresh insights can help you refine your strategy for 2025, and hit the ground running on 1 Jan with more confidence in your ability to deliver.
- Work within budget constraints. The fourth quarter can see organizations reduce budgets and be reluctant to start new programs. Yet this is precisely the time when you can invest on a smaller scale in low-stakes, high- potential experiments that could 10X your performance.
How do you build a culture of experimentation?
- Leadership role modelling
This is critical. Leaders must set the tone. For example, a senior executive may say, ‘This meeting is not getting me the outcome that I want, so for the next six weeks I’m going to change the agenda. Here’s what I think will happen in that time. I’m going to measure progress, and at the end I’m going to stop and reflect on whether my hypothesis happened. If it did, I’ll keep doing it, and if not, I’ll iterate.’
Role modelling experimentation covers all aspects of it, which means showing vulnerability, sharing what you don’t know, and expressing your willingness to fail and learn. All of this makes it safe for your employees to feel they can do the same.
- Training
Experimentation is not a default setting for many people, so if you want your employees to have a more creative, iterative mindset and approach, you need to be intentional about it (spell out that you are experimenting, why, and how) and enable them with the right training, tools, and support. Training shows your people that you’re serious about experimentation, which is particularly important in organizations with perfectionist tendencies and ‘good news only’ cultures.
- Psychological safety
People can’t learn from one another if they don’t feel safe to be open and honest about what they're experiencing. If you want to scale learning from experimentation beyond individuals or a small enclave of leaders who are willing to try and role model it, you’ve got to create forums for people to discuss their experiments openly. If that foundation of psychological safety isn’t there, you won’t build a culture of experimentation.
How can you get started with experimentation in Q4?
- Pick a problem to solve. It could be a long-standing or recent issue. Just be clear what it is you’re trying to address with the experiment, just as Wipro BPO in India did with its onboarding in this case study.
- Understand your metrics. Go into the experiment knowing the metrics you want to track and look closely at the results. For example, our Walking with Agility program has experimentation embedded in it as a key learning outcome, so you would expect to see a burgeoning culture of experimentation as a result.
- Choose a contained group of people (c.20-25). This single cohort might be all the senior managers in a function or business unit, or a distributed group of influencers. The key is to ensure these people suit the needs of the experiment, are likely to benefit most from it, and have sufficient reach to influence others’ behaviours and spread future experimentation.
- Think digital-based learning. Digital-led learning is scalable, cost-effective, and quick to deploy. Our programs, including Walking with Accountability, can be delivered 100% virtually and globally, require no customisation, and are bite-size, enabling employees to learn, implement, and reflect at their own pace. While live learning is important (our programs can have in-person interactions), when budgets are squeezed and speed is of the essence, digital is perfect for getting started with experimentation.
Companies with a culture of experimentation fail faster and smarter than their competitors. While most industries have moved past the once-common tech mindset of ‘move fast and break things,’ an ethos of ‘move fast and learn things’ still has much to offer.
With that in mind, as the leaves start falling, I encourage you to head into Q4 with an experimental mindset. By piloting programs now, cultivating fresh ideas, and integrating the lessons quickly into your strategy and plans for next year, you could set your organization up for transformative success in 2025.
To start experimenting with any of our solutions, click here.
