Experimentation is a sign of a healthy learning organization
Experimentation isn’t chaos, it’s a sign that an organization is learning, reflecting, and evolving with intention.
We say we want innovation. We say we want growth. But when it’s time to try something new, we freeze. Or just as badly, we try ten things at once without ever stopping to ask what worked.
In Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson introduces the idea of intelligent failure, the kind of failure that happens when we try something genuinely new, with care and curiosity. These failures aren’t mistakes to be punished. They’re signs that we’re learning. That we’re alive.
This mindset echoes the way scientists approach their work. Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about success not as reaching a goal, but as learning something new through tiny experiments. When scientists run experiments, the aim isn’t to be right. It’s to understand. Even when the hypothesis doesn’t hold, the outcome moves them forward.
But in organizations, I’ve seen two common traps that block this kind of learning:
Too much experimentation – where teams try everything, but never pause to analyze or share what happened. The learning is lost.
Too little experimentation – where new ideas are shut down with a familiar line: “That’s not how we do things around here.”
Healthy organizational learning lives somewhere in between. It’s not about experimenting more for the sake of it. It’s about experimenting just enough, with intention, with structure, and with reflection built in.
You’ll know an organization is experimenting thoughtfully when:
People run small, reversible tests instead of launching massive, unproven initiatives.
Teams share what didn’t work, not just what did.
Success is defined by what was learned, not just whether a target was hit.
If we want to build true learning cultures, we need to stop fearing experimentation. It’s not a sign of chaos. It’s a sign we’re paying attention.
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