The last one on experimentation
For now, anyway
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
What to do when you don’t know what to do.
How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Succeed big, fail small.
How to use experimentation to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
Managing uncertainty.
How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
Retail 3.0.
How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2026 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
Invention is not something which can be planned for, nor do experiments fit pre-set goals.
Goals, rather, emerge along the path as the experiments enable us to discover more about the world around us.
The most important aspect of experimentation is thus learning, but the way that managers typically go about it ensures highly limited results.
Personal updates before we go-go
Another week, another health issue. Ah, life with kids in kindergarten. This time around, it is our old acquaintance sinusitis. Huzzah.
Although I fully understand that they are a reality of having children a certain age, it would be silly of me not to admit that I am getting immensely fed up with the constant sick days. Attempting to work with headaches, fevers, soar throats, and all kinds of other unpleasant things, is one thing. Doing it while also helping take care of the kids is difficult on a completely different scale. Once they go to bed, there is no fuel left in the tank. None.
Noticed that Henry Mintzberg and John Kay, among others, were doing an event called “Strategy in times of radical uncertainty”. Probably my ego talking, but I was somewhat surprised I was not invited. After all, it is very much my field of expertise.
I am obviously not oblivious to the fact that both are giants in comparison to the field mouse that is yours truly, but as deservedly celebrated as both are, neither fully grasps the true nature of uncertainty nor the finer points of strategy in complexity. That much is entirely evident from their writings.
Kay is an economist, not strategist, who did not actually prove radical uncertainty (I did). And while Mintzberg’s notion of emergent strategy remains highly relevant to this day, his overall strategic argument is far closer to the conventional schools than many (himself included) seem to realize.
So, yes, a bit surprised.
As I may have mentioned before, my favorite sport to watch is Formula One. I suppose it would be given my own sporting background, but my personality is also such that I am drawn to what undoubtedly is the pinnacle of competition.
Recently, though, I have begun to dig deeper into the strategic details of the sport and, admittedly to my delight, have found that most of the successful teams employ a number of aspects of adaptive strategy.
Listening to interviews with strategists, engineers, and team principals, it is easy to spot the core principles that we employ in action, whether it is Mercedes’ historic success that was fueled by safe-to-fail experimentation and detect-respond-evolve, or McLaren’s turnaround from last to first due to a larger focus on adaptability and distributed decision-making.
It is, of course, not that strange that F1 teams employ similar concepts. After all, at the end of the proverbial day, peak performance is peak performance, whether in business or sports, and the evidence clearly supports the conclusion that adaptive strategy the best way to achieve it. But the F1 insights tell me that there are paths of potential promise that I had not previously considered.
Moving onto markets.