How CEOs can build an experimental mindset

Where a company begins its journey isn’t necessarily where it will end up. Nokia began corporate life as a paper mill, Lamborghini made tractors and Shell started out selling antiques. Stories like these are thrilling in hindsight. But if you’re running an established business, it's hard to think about moving your company in a new direction. Certainly, plenty of businesses have failed to adapt to change.

So, how do you actively infuse agility into your organisation? What is a 'spirit of experimentation'?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist at King’s College London, the founder of Ness Labs and the author of Tiny Experiments. While it could easily be filed under self-improvement, the book has struck a chord with the business community, winning Book of the Year at the 2026 Business Book Awards.

I caught up with Le Cunff to hear more about her ideas, including:

• The 24-hour “self-anthropology” exercise to do before your first experiment
• The four ready-made PACTs for common leadership headaches
• How to get your whole team experimenting
• Why the best debriefs celebrate an “absolute catastrophe”

How to build an experimental mindset

“The experimental mindset is based on the scientific method,” says Le Cunff. “It’s really about having a systematic approach to applying curiosity for navigating uncertainty. You're experimenting because you want to generate new knowledge and learn something new.”

Her process involves collecting your own data and analysing it to make more informed decisions: “It really changes our relationship to failure from that binary definition where we say, 'Here's the outcome we want and if we get there that's success, and if we don't get there then that's failure,' to a relationship with failure that's a lot more generative. Because if you're wrong, great, now you know and you can make better decisions.”

Le Cunff encourages leaders, before running their first tiny experiment, to begin with observation in the spirit of an anthropologist. For just one day, she challenges you to play a game of ‘self-anthropology’.

The metaphor is a deliberate one because when anthropologists do their work, they go and study a new culture with no preconceptions, no assumptions and – most importantly – no judgement. They just take notes, observe, and ask questions.

Observe like an anthropologist, test like a scientist

Grab a pen and notepad or open the notes app on your phone. Whenever something crosses your mind, write a timestamp and a few words. It could be inspired by something you read, an interaction with a colleague, an idea that popped into your head while in the shower or listening to the Business Leader podcast. Also, ask yourself questions such as:

• What gives me energy?
• What drains my energy?
• What are areas of potential growth, doubt or uncertainty?

“I guarantee you that if you spend 24 hours just observing your work pretending to be an anthropologist,” says Le Cunff, “you will notice things that you've been doing on autopilot or things you've been doing just because that's the way they've always been done. These are ripe for experimentation.”

Once you have the data, your role changes to scientist. Use your observations to frame a research question, then turn that question into a hypothesis. Here are a few examples:

The final step is to turn your hypothesis into a pact. As Le Cunff describes in Tiny Experiments, a pact is a simple and repeatable activity that will inevitably bring you closer to achieving your authentic ambitions, regardless of the actual result of each trial. It follows a simple format:

"I will [action] for [duration]."

PACT is also an acronym. It stands for purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable. What makes a pact so effective is that it focuses on outputs (e.g., “pitch to three investors a week for the next two months”) rather than outcomes (e.g., “close a £2m funding round by the summer”).

Based on the examples above, the pacts could be:

• I will keep Monday mornings meeting-free for the next six weeks
• I will hand one decision a week to a team member, without stepping in, for eight weeks
• I will join one sales call or customer visit every fortnight for the next quarter
• I will send the board one big question a week before each meeting for the next six months

Le Cunff also suggests pacts can be a better fit than one of the most familiar goal-setting frameworks in business: “SMART goals can work really well when you already know what you want to achieve. You've done it before, or someone else on the team has, and you need a simple, measurable way to do it again.

“I would argue, though, that most challenges that we face in the business world don't really match that situation where you can just copy and paste a blueprint for success that has worked in the past. Most of the time, the parameters are slightly different, or, as we're seeing today with AI, for example, there is simply no precedent that you can use to just apply a recipe that we know works.

"You need to figure it out for the first time," Le Cunff advises, "and you need to go through that messy process of understanding what you have in front of you.”

What is 'Plus Minus Next'?

Another tool that Le Cunff uses personally is a weekly review called Plus Minus Next. It essentially allows you to review what worked and what didn’t, and think about what you might want to experiment with next.

“The reason why it's so powerful is that it allows you to pause and notice the things that are actually working, which is something business leaders don't tend to do,” she says.

“We are always on to the next thing and we don't really take stock of the successes and things that worked well. So that helps you do that.”

Le Cunff urges leaders to be honest with themselves. Even if last week went well, what could have been better? What were areas of friction or frustration where things could have worked more smoothly?

“Then the most important part is the 'Next' column,” she says. “Instead of just having a static dashboard where you capture what worked and what didn't, you actively think about what you might want to tweak and how you might want to iterate. So this data becomes a lot more useful and actionable.”

It could look something like this:

Why teams learn faster when they’re allowed to fail

Le Cunff points out in her book that in ancient Greece, learning in public was woven into civic life. In Athens, the agora – the city’s public square – was where citizens debated ideas and philosophers, such as Socrates, tested their thinking by questioning passers-by. Exposing an idea to public challenge was seen as a way to sharpen it.

“We learn faster when we learn together,” she says. Her advice to the companies she works with is to start with a kick-off meeting where everybody shares the challenges where they feel stuck or face a lot of uncertainty. Using the tools covered above, everyone in the meeting then designs their own tiny experiment.

“When you experiment as a team,” Le Cunff continues, “it can be really nice with this process for everyone to have an action that is different based on the challenge that they're facing but for the entire team to have the same duration.”

“What's really important here is that the debrief meeting is not about saying, ‘Look at me, look at how successful I was, I did great.’ The meeting is about saying, ‘This is what I learned.’ There's actually a lot of value in saying, ‘Hey everyone, this experiment was horrible, miserable, an absolute catastrophe – nobody do this.’”

Sharing these lessons can stop colleagues repeating the same mistakes. But the approach only succeeds with a culture of psychological safety – giving people on your team permission to fail. Without it, you will have colleagues only running experiments they know they’re going to succeed in.

“Which is a waste of time, energy and money for everyone,” Le Cunff says. “You want them to run experiments that have the potential to fail.”

Four easy ways to adopt an experimental mindset

1. Spend a day as an anthropologist. Before changing anything, observe. For 24 hours, timestamp every thought, idea and interaction that crosses your mind and note what gives you energy and what drains it. Look for the things you do on autopilot or because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. Those are your first candidates for an experiment.
   
2. Lay out your pact. Pick a challenge where there’s no blueprint to follow and write a single line: I will [action] for [duration]. Keep it focused on what you’ll do, not what you hope to achieve. If you can’t track it, it isn’t a pact yet.
   
3. Book a weekly Plus Minus Next. Block out 20 minutes to note what worked, what didn’t and what you’ll tweak next week. Give the Plus column as much attention as the Minus. Most leaders rush past their wins, so this is the moment to notice them.
   
4. Run a team experiment sprint. Get your leadership team in a room to share where they feel stuck. Have each person design their own tiny experiment, all running for the same length of time. When the sprint ends, hold a debrief where the only question is “What did you learn?” Make it clear that a failed experiment, shared honestly, is worth as much as a successful one.

Tiny Experiments is published by Profile Books and is available now.