April 18, 2022

Top 3 Tips for Executives Embracing an Experimenter’s Mindset

By: sanjay sathe

In today’s fast-paced culture, innovation has become a key aspect of survival. Companies that nurture curiosity and embrace experimentation are more agile, adaptive, and impactful. Read this blog to learn how embracing an experimenter’s mindset can grow your company.

Top 3 Tips for Executives Embracing an Experimenter’s Mindset
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The rapid rate at which business is evolving increases every day. Today it takes more than a great marketing strategy to grow. Executive leaders need to embrace a culture of experimentation in order to remain competitive.

Some of the biggest global organizations, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google, have grown significantly as a result of experimentation. However, according to Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke’s book titled Building a Culture of Experimentation, many companies have still been slow to embrace an experimenter’s mindset.

Creating a Culture of Experimentation

When a company implements new ideas and solutions across the organization without restrictions, that represents a culture of experimentation. The executive team needs to be out front, fostering this culture. Executives should develop a collaborative mindset, always seeking out their teams’ opinions on any venture, regardless of titles. A culture of experimentation revolves around innovation. Without the ability to innovate, you cannot compete in today’s market.

Keep in mind that experimentation doesn’t mean there won’t be shortcomings. If success was guaranteed, it wouldn’t be called an experiment. No matter how much you prepare and carefully construct your data, sometimes experiments fail. Some ideas are implemented and flourish, while others flounder. Even so, sometimes it’s trying and failing that leads to that one winning idea that elevates your company to new heights of growth and success.

Why Is Experimentation Important?

According to Deloitte, developing a culture of experimentation helps companies adopt innovative ideas faster- a key factor in thriving in today’s competitive market. There’s always a new technology, communication device, or business model right around the corner. Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor Emeritus of Marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says “companies won’t survive in this cut-throat competition unless they learn to challenge their current ways of thinking.”

Constant technological advancements represent the driving force behind how companies do business today. In the current market, adaptability and the willingness to think outside the box represent the keys to success.

Embracing an Experimenter’s Mindset

Executives are the leaders who steer teams toward success and change starts from the top. Therefore, executives must embrace an experimenter’s mindset and encourage an innovative culture at all levels of the organization. Here are three tips on how to make a successful transition:

  1. Accept ideas without restrictions: It’s critical to ensure that everyone’s ideas are heard. Maintain an “open-door policy” and remember that everyone has a voice regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Listen and hear employees’ ideas.
  2. Testing: It seems self-explanatory, but experimentation can never work without testing. You always need to test the ideas you implement, even if they are vastly different from each other or current processes. Testing provides results and performance metrics to determine which ideas work and which you need to dismiss. Conducting A/B testing is always a smart move when experimenting.
  3. Encourage new ideas and new initiatives: Creating an environment of encouragement frees employees to develop innovative ideas without the worry of failing or succeeding. They will learn from failure, and their ideas will improve over time. Meanwhile, the company will become more innovative and adaptable to change. After all, “the only constant in life is change.”

Executives represent the key individuals managers and employees look to for guidance. With a lot of expectations placed upon executives to lead companies towards growth and success, these goals cannot be realized without the willingness to experiment and innovate. The outcome of experimentation can be valuable, and if nothing else, you will get priceless insights. As William Blake says, “the true method of knowledge is experiment”.

Embracing experimentation can lead to innovation that revolutionizes an industry, much like SucceedSmart. Our modern executive search platform is disrupting the industry by providing candidates a bias-free environment to directly connect with Fortune 1000 companies. Candidates may self-select, through a double opt-in, to identify themselves as diversity candidates, while also having an opportunity to share this diversity status with corporations. Corporations also opt-in to include a selection of diverse candidates for each requisition. Each candidate’s profile remains free of personally identifiable information, leaving a decision to match with candidates based solely on accomplishments, breaking through any bias. Visit our website to learn more about this modern executive search platform.