Top Tips for Getting Started on Experimentation

2 Min. Read

In our recent blog on the topic of experimentation, we focused on why we believe Q4 is the 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.

Experimentation can seem scary, but here are our top tips to get going:  

1. Leader role modelling

Leaders need to be the change they want to see in their organizations. That means talking about the value of experimentation, what it means for your company, and how you’re going to approach it. It also means trying out some experiments of your own: structuring a meeting in a new way, trying some A/B testing in a go-to-market approach, et cetera.

You also need to make it clear to your people when you’re trying something experimental, because that helps employees think more critically about what they're doing and why. For example, if you’re bringing more customer data to your team because you’d like to see if increased customer insight can impact sales, tell your team members why you’re bringing them data, and get their feedback about its usefulness. It also gets them talking about the concept of experimentation, which can support with psychological safety and generate engagement and excitement.  

2. Communicate about failure

If you want to build a culture of experimentation, you must banish ‘good news only’ approaches. True experimentation cultures shine a spotlight on failure as something to celebrate, so long as people failed in good faith and took meaningful lessons from it.

Talking about failures, big and small, as a regular part of your communications calendar is a powerful symbol of a culture of experimentation – especially paired with messages about times when what you learned from failure eventually led to success.

3. Find your own way

There is no single way to begin building a culture of experimentation. Your approach needs to help deliver your strategy and support your culture. While there are some common hallmarks of a culture of experimentation, the key is to be courageous enough to try new ideas and ways of working to discover which ones are best for you.

Companies with a culture of experimentation fail faster and smarter than their competitors, and come away with insights their competitors lack. As Q4 is now underway, I urge you to pilot that new program you’ve been considering, revamp the meeting that just never leads to the right outputs, test out the feedback approach you read about recently, and integrate the lessons quickly into your strategy and plans for next year to set yourself and your organization up for transformative success in 2025. To start experimenting with any of our solutions, click here.