Experiment or Die: Surviving (and Thriving) in a World on Fast-Forward

Signal Boost: “State of Independence”, Donna Summer
An uplifting anthem about personal empowerment and forward momentum, celebrating the belief that true transformation begins when you trust yourself and take action.

Change isn’t just happening, it’s accelerating. New technologies used to take decades to settle in. Now, they’re mainstream in months. Entire industries are being reshaped before annual strategies are even signed off. The gap between disruption and adoption has shrunk, and the old idea that businesses can “wait and see” is obsolete. To survive and thrive in this world on fast-forward, organisations need to make experimentation a habit, not a hobby. This is business agility in practice.

The Speed of Change: From Decades to Days

Let’s rewind for a moment:

• The Industrial Revolution (late 1700s) took decades to embed.
• The internet took around 7 years to reach mass adoption.
• ChatGPT hit 100 million users in just 2 months.

The acceleration is real and it’s measurable:

• The lifespan of a business competency has dropped from 10 years in 2016 to under 5 years today. Some skills go stale in 18 months.
• In the United States, S&P 500 companies used to stick around for 60 years. Now? Fewer than 20.
• McKinsey predicts 75% of today’s S&P 500 will be replaced by 2030.

In tech? Moore’s Law, as a prediction of microchip performance, is old news. The leap from GPT-2 to GPT-4 happened in less than three years and not just bigger models, but radically more capable.

Learning Cultures Are Business Survival Kits

It’s tempting to think every new development needs to be adopted, but that’s a fast track to burnout and chaos. The smarter move is to build a culture of learning and evaluation.

Learning isn’t a side hustle anymore. It’s central to strategy. That means:

• Creating protected time for people to learn and experiment
• Encouraging curiosity and rewarding exploration
• Making it safe to try, test, and iterate
• Recognising that "failing" is still learning

But just learning in isolation isn’t enough. Tech teams need to be closely aligned to the business, not orbiting around it or waiting patiently for orders. When technologists understand real business pain points, they’re better placed to apply the right tools in the right way and not just deploy a shiny widget and move on.

“Value isn’t delivered when the tool is shipped. It’s delivered when the business sees the outcome and realises the value.”

Let’s be clear: outcomes matter more than outputs. That’s what learning cultures enable outcomes with measurable, and meaningful impact. It’s the foundation of true organisational transformation.

From Requirement to Real Opportunity: A Personal Example

Recently, I was working with a business that had a straight forward need to integrate MS Outlook with their CRM. There were several routes we could’ve taken with varying degrees of cost and complexity.

But when the team demoed M365 Copilot for Sales, something shifted. What started as a simple ask turned into a lightbulb moment.

Suddenly, they weren’t just seeing integration they were seeing:

• Automated summaries of customer emails and meetings
• AI-powered insights about customer sentiment and next steps

The team was genuinely excited. They saw how AI adoption in business could lift admin off their plates and create space for more valuable customer conversations.

That’s what experimentation enables. You don’t just meet requirements, you unlock possibilities.

Experimentation as a Core Competency

In today’s world, you don’t need to adopt everything. But you do need a system to:

1. Evaluate: Is this worth our attention right now?
2. Test: Can we trial this safely and learn quickly?
3. Decide: Do we scale, shelve, or move on?

It’s not about massive transformation programmes. It’s about micro-experiments that fuel macro insights.

Set Up for Success: Don’t Just Talk About Change, Enable It

A culture of continuous learning sounds great on paper, but without the right foundations, it won’t stick. Businesses need to be designed for adaptability. That means creating an environment where change isn’t just possible, it’s natural.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Lean, Flexible Processes

Bureaucracy kills momentum. If it takes six weeks and three approval boards to start a proof of concept, you're too slow. Simplify. Automate. Make small-scale experimentation easy and safe.

2. Ringfenced Funding for Innovation

If every budget line is locked down to BAU, there’s no oxygen for innovation. Set aside a portion of spend, even a small one, for testing, piloting, and learning. It shows intent and invites creativity.

3. Skilled, Empowered Teams

Learning is fuel, but you also need the engine. That means teams with the right blend of technical depth, business context, and permission to act. Upskilling should be ongoing, not reactive.

4. Leadership Mindset Shift

You don’t need leaders with all the answers. You need leaders who ask better questions. Who create clarity, reduce fear, and model curiosity. Leaders who see failure as part of the journey, not the end of it.

5. A Clear, Documented Application Landscape

You can’t move quickly if you don’t know what’s where. Too many organisations have shadow systems, undocumented platforms, or key-person dependencies. Visibility breeds confidence and lets you experiment without breaking the wrong thing.

Mini Checklist: Are You Set Up for Learning?

• Do your teams have protected time to experiment?
• Is it safe to fail (and share what was learned)?
• Do leaders model their own learning openly?
• Are new technologies triaged and tested quickly?

If you’re not creating space for learning, you’re creating space for obsolescence.

What It All Comes Down To

Agile, DevOps, product thinking; they’re all good. But the real unlock isn’t a framework. It’s a mindset.

• Curious over cautious.
• Fast over perfect.
• Learning over knowing.

Like the chorus of State of Independence suggests, transformation begins when belief turns into action. Businesses that learn faster, adapt faster and win bigger.

Because in a world that’s stuck on fast-forward, it’s not the strongest who survive, it’s the most adaptable.