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Tag: Management Experts

  • How the World’s Top Companies Use Experimentation to Outlearn Uncertainty

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    From Airbnb and Booking.com to Amazon and Google, leading companies show how disciplined experimentation turns uncertainty into advantage. Unsplash+

    Leaders at Airbnb wondered whether listings with professional photographs might perform better than those using user-uploaded images. Rather than relying on instinct or anecdote, they ran a controlled experiment: some listings were assigned professional photography, while others retained user-generated photos. The results were striking. Listings with professional photos received more than twice as many bookings and earned hosts over $1,000 more per month. What began as a simple test ultimately led Airbnb to launch a full-scale photography program, transforming how hosts presented their properties and how customers experienced the platform.

    This is experimentation in action: a disciplined approach to uncertainty that allows organizations to uncover insights they might never reach through planning alone. 

    Booking.com reportedly runs over 25,000 experiments each year, a practice that has helped transform it from a small startup into a global travel powerhouse. According to Lukas Vermeer, its director of experimentation, Booking.com runs more than 1,000 experiments simultaneously, often tailoring tests to individual website visitors. These are primarily A/B tests, in which two alternatives are assessed side by side to determine which performs better. Over time, this approach allows the company to optimize entire customer journeys, refining everything from search results to booking flows based on real-world behavior rather than assumptions. 

    What these companies demonstrate is that sustained experimentation fundamentally changes how organizations learn. 

    Why experimentation matters more than ever

    Building a culture of experimentation creates the conditions for unexpected opportunities to surface and be exploited. It encourages organizations to move beyond incremental improvement toward breakthrough innovation, while also improving internal processes and engagement. Employees in experimental cultures tend to be more curious, more resilient and more willing to challenge the status quo. 

    Creating this culture starts with the leaders. For experimentation to take root, leaders must be willing to redefine what success and failure mean. Instead of treating failure as something to be avoided or punished, leaders need to frame it as an essential part of learning. This shift enables a growth mindset in which teams are encouraged to generate ideas, test them quickly and scale what works. Crucially, leadership teams must model this behavior themselves. When leaders visibly test, learn and adapt, experimentation becomes embedded in the organization’s DNA rather than confined to innovation labs or product teams. 

    Empowering employees to test and learn

    A true culture of experimentation empowers employees at every level to test hypotheses and iterate continuously. That requires time, tools and psychological safety. Providing dedicated time for experimentation sends a powerful signal. 3M famously allowed its researchers to spend 15 percent of their time exploring scientific topics or personal interests, regardless of immediate commercial relevance. The policy led to numerous innovations, including the invention of Post-It Notes. 

    Google adopted a similar philosophy, allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects. While not every experiment succeeded, the approach produced significant breakthroughs like Gmail and AdSense. By making experimentation an expected part of the job, companies like Google and 3M normalized creative exploration and reduced the fear associated with trying something new. 

    Amazon has taken a related but distinct approach, fostering a culture of “many small bets.” Rather than seeking uncertainty upfront, Amazon continually tests new products, processes and business models, accepting that most experiments will fail, but that a few will deliver outsized returns. 

    Leaders don’t need to replicate these models exactly. Even modest steps, such as allocating one day per month for experimentation, offering workshops or providing small seed budgets, can be enough to spark momentum. 

    Making data the backbone of learning

    Experiment without measurement is just trial and error. Effective experimentation depends on data. Leaders should encourage teams to document their experiments clearly: what hypothesis was tested, what data was collected and what was learned. Results, positive or negative, should be shared openly to maximize organizational learning. Over time, this creates a shared language or evidence and reduces reliance on opinion-driven decision-making. 

    As Adam Savage, the special effects designer and co-host of Mythbusters, has said: “In the spirit of science, there really is no such this as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.” the essence of this approach is learning: rapid experimentation is vital for outpacing competitors, far more so than simply being right. 

    Reducing fear through structure and play

    Many organizations struggle with experimentation due to fear—specifically, fear of failure. Psychologists describe loss aversion as our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. In business, this often shows up as risk avoidance, perfectionism and decision paralysis. Leaders must actively normalize failure as a learning mechanism and a key part of progress. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos captured this succinctly when he said, “If you know it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.” Booking.com’s Lukas Vermeer echoes this philosophy, emphasizing that experiments exist to discover what works, not to prove someone right. 

    Some organizations have gone further by gamifying experimentation. Platforms such as LabQuest have integrated points, badges and leaderboards into testing and user research, turning participation into a game. This approach has reportedly increased engagement and improved data quality, with significantly higher participation rates and more actionable insights compared to traditional methods. Gamification reduces the emotional stakes of failure and reframes experimentation as something engaging rather than intimidating. 

    A simple framework leaders can use

    One practical framework for experimentation is the Build-Measure-Learn-Loop, popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. It begins with a clear hypothesis: We believe that changing X will improve Y. Teams then run a small, fast, low-cost test, measure the results using relevant metrics and decide whether to scale, refine or abandon the idea. 

    This loop isn’t limited to product development. HR teams can experiment with new onboarding processes. Marketing teams can trial messaging variations. Even finance teams can explore alternative budgeting allocation models. When every initiative is treated as a learning opportunity rather than a final verdict, organizations become more adaptive and resilient. 

    Steven Bartlett, founder of Social Chain and host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, underscores the role leadership plays in this process. “Get your team to conduct fast, fearless experiments—more often,” he advises. Bartlett has described how his social team reports weekly on the tests they’ve run, reinforcing that experimentation is a core expectation. As he puts it, whether teams behave this way ultimately comes “down to the leadership.” 

    Thriving through uncertainty

    In a world changing at unprecedented speed, relying solely on past data and established models is increasingly risky. Markets shift, customer expectations evolve and competitive advantages erode quickly. Experimentation offers a way forward, not by eliminating uncertainty but by learning within it. 

    High-performing companies test, learn and adapt in real time. For leaders, the lesson is clear: the ability to foster experimentation is no longer optional. It is a core capability for navigating unpredictability and uncovering unexpected solutions. 

    The Art of Unexpected Solutions: Using Lateral Thinking to Find Breakthroughs by Paul Sloane was published on the January 3, 2026, by Kogan Page, priced £14.99.

    How the World’s Top Companies Use Experimentation to Outlearn Uncertainty

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    Paul Sloane

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  • A.I. Won’t Eliminate Managers, But It Will Redefine Leadership

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    As A.I. automates information and routine decision-making, it is forcing managers to confront whether they truly know how to lead people. Unsplash+

    The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence in the workplace is thick with dystopian forecasts and utopian promises. Will it eradicate jobs or usher in a new era of human creativity? For managers and leaders, the question is more pointed: will advances in A.I. make my role obsolete? The answer is a definitive no. A.I. will not replace managers. It will, however, act as a great accelerant, stripping away the administrative crutches many have leaned on for decades and laying bare a critical deficit in our organizations: the inability to genuinely manage people.

    For more than a century, the prevailing management model has been one of command-and-control. Managers were expected to be the nexus of knowledge, the primary problem-solvers and the arbiters of work. Promotion into management was typically a reward for attaining technical proficiency in a particular area, creating a legion of what the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has called “accidental managers”—individuals promoted for their knowledge but utterly unprepared for the human complexities of leadership. In the U.K. alone, the CMI estimates that 82 percent of managers receive no formal preparation or training to take on the people management aspects of their role.

    This is the category of manager that A.I. is coming for. The manager whose primary value lies in holding information, creating reports, assigning tasks and resolving routine problems is standing on a trapdoor. Generative A.I. and advanced analytics can now perform these functions with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Knowledge is no longer power because knowledge is ubiquitous. A recent MIT Sloan study found that access to A.I. tools increased productivity for knowledge workers by over 40 percent, largely by automating the synthesis and retrieval of information—the very tasks that once consumed a manager’s day. When the “what” and the “how” of a task are automated, what is left for a manager to do?

    The answer is everything that truly matters: the “who” and the “why.” What remains are the deeply human skills that A.I. cannot replicate. These include fostering psychological safety, building trust, inspiring motivation, navigating conflict and cultivating an employee’s innate potential. In this new landscape, the manager’s role shifts from chief problem-solver to chief enabler. Success will no longer be measured by the solutions a manager provides, but by the problem-solving capabilities they build within their teams.

    This is where the crisis in management becomes painfully evident. Despite decades of investment the world over in leadership development programs, each busying itself inventing its own version of a management wheel, employee engagement levels remain stubbornly low. Gallup reports that only 10 percent of workers in the U.K., for example, feel engaged in their work. Globally, the share of employees experiencing high daily stress has steadily climbed over the past 20 years to 41 percent, rising to nearly 60 percent for those working under poor management. Together, disengagement and stress are estimated to cost the global economy $8.9 trillion annually, roughly nine percent of global GDP. 

    Traditional management approaches, which emphasize telling, directing and correcting, are misaligned with how people learn and perform. By removing autonomy and short-circuiting learning, they unintentionally fuel disengagement and burnout, precisely the outcomes organizations can least afford in an A.I.-accelerated environment. 

    The solution requires a fundamental reboot of our management operating system. For years, organizations have attempted to retrofit coaching skills onto managers through formal, session-based models like GROW. These models, while effective in executive coaching contexts, are ill-suited for the dynamic, fast-paced reality of frontline management. Time-starved managers rarely have the capacity for scheduled, hour-long coaching conversations, nor the psychological distance required to coach their direct reports while holding them accountable for performance.

    What’s needed instead is a more integrated, behavioral approach that embeds coaching into the fabric of daily interactions. This means shifting from reflexively fixing problems to facilitating better thinking in others, and bringing development into the flow of work. 

    At its core, this approach can be distilled into a simple behavioral sequence summarized as STAR. 

    Stop: The first, and most difficult, step is resisting the instinct to immediately solve the problem when an employee raises an issue. Instead of jumping to an answer, the manager pauses and takes a step back.

    Think: In that pause, the manager assesses whether this is a coachable moment. Is the situation non-urgent? Is there an opportunity for learning rather than rescue?

    Ask: Rather than telling, the manager adopts an inquiry-led approach, using questions to prompt reflection and ownership. A subtle but effective shift is moving from blame-oriented “why?” questions to solution-focused “what?” questions. For example, replacing “Why is this late?” with “What obstacles came up, and what options do we have now?” changes the tone from accusation to collaboration.

    Result: The interaction concludes with clear next steps and follow-up, reinforcing accountability while ensuring the employee owns the outcome and and that there will be an opportunity for appropriate feedback.

    This is not coaching as a formal, scheduled meeting. It’s a 90-second interaction in the hallway or a two-minute exchange on a video call. It’s coaching as a continuous micro-practice. The cumulative impact, however, is macro. Government-sponsored research conducted by the London School of Economics has shown that managers trained in this approach increased the amount of time they spent coaching in the flow of work by 70 percent. The benefits ripple outwards: managers regain time as their teams become more self-sufficient, employees feel more valued and trusted and the organization develops a resilient, adaptive and highly engaged culture.

    A.I. is an epochal technology that will automate complexity and democratize access to knowledge. This transition will be uncomfortable for managers who have built their authority on being the expert in the room. But for those who recognize that the future of leadership lies in human connection, judgment and meaning-making, it represents the greatest opportunity in a generation. 

    The challenge is clear: evolve from a director of tasks into a developer of people. A.I. will increasingly manage the tasks. Leaders must manage meaning and the conditions in which people can do their best thinking. A.I. won’t replace those who fail to make this shift, but it will make them increasingly irrelevant by revealing a new, higher standard of leadership.

    Dominic Ashley-Timms is the CEO of the performance consultancy Notion and co-author of the bestselling book, The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower That Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader.

    A.I. Won’t Eliminate Managers, But It Will Redefine Leadership

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    Dominic Ashley-Timms

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  • Inside the Trust Recession: What’s Driving the Crisis in Modern Leadership

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    From admitting what you don’t know to listening with real empathy, today’s leaders must rebuild trust one honest interaction at a time. Unsplash+

    Trust. Without it, every relationship disintegrates into dust. Today’s workplace is being reshaped by forces that make trust harder to build and easier than ever to lose. Artificial intelligence is accelerating decision cycles. Hybrid work has reduced organic connection. And after years of economic volatility, employees are more skeptical of leadership notices and more sensitive to signs of inconsistency. We’ve become obsessed with automation without connection and conversations without intention. The result is reactive behavior that breeds short-term thinking and corrodes long-term reputation. Instant gratification, whether in communication, decision-making or performance expectations, is rapidly eroding trust at scale.

    According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report, 61 percent of respondents worry that business leaders are purposely trying to mislead people by communicating things that are false or exaggerated. The trust deficit is real, and growing. But the path forward doesn’t rely on better dashboards or more polished messaging. It lies in leaders doing something that machines cannot: making human connection a priority. Here are three potent ways to build trust as a leader today.

    Become the trusted guide

    Many leaders have felt it: the sting of not knowing an answer in a moment when everyone expects certainty. Traditional leadership norms reward omniscience, so admitting “I don’t know” can feel like weakness. But here’s the truth: imperfection equals connection. Your relationship with authenticity is tested most in high-stakes moments. When you’re asked a question you can’t answer, you have two options:

    Option 1: Pretend. This reactive move puts you out of integrity with yourself and breaks trust with the person opposite you. 

    Option 2: Own your truth. Counterintuitively, this sparks connection, demonstrates integrity and signals competence, ultimately accelerating trust in any business relationship.

    Imagine you’re on a call with the CTO of a new client. All eyes are on you, including the three team members you invited to shadow the session. You get a question you can’t answer. Try this: “That’s a really good question that I don’t have an answer for. Here’s what I’ll do: after our conversation, I’ll dig into it and find you an answer—and if that fails, I’ll connect you with the right person who can. Does that sound fair?”

    The trust-building power lies in your tone, warmth and curiosity. You’re increasing your credibility stock for both your client and your team. And in an era when A.I. can simulate certainty but not sincerity, humility is a competitive advantage. 

    Acknowledge others for their gifts

    Research from Professor Norihiro Sadato of Japan’s National Institute for Physiological Sciences found that receiving a compliment activates the same part of the brain (the striatum) as receiving a financial award. In other words: authentic praise feels like currency. Internal recognition—specific, timely and real—encourages people to express themselves without fear, drop the mask and own their gifts.  

    Picture this: it’s the first five minutes of your weekly all-hands meeting, and you decide to acknowledge your colleague for something you observed yesterday: “The way you handled that difficult conversation with the marketing team was incredible. You stayed calm, listened deeply and asked intentional questions. Watching you navigate that moment inspired me to handle conflict with more presence.”

    This public recognition not only inspires your colleague to own his genius, but it also reinforces this conscious behavior at scale. However, the final sentence is where the magic lies. It signals to your team that you are a work-in-progress, just like them (a.k.a. a human being). Do this right, and you’ll become not only a relatable leader but also an influential one. When your compliment embodies authenticity, specificity and impact, trust will find you. 

    In a moment when employee engagement is declining and burnout is rising, small acknowledgments like this have an oversized impact. They scale trust by modeling the psychological safety everyone says they want but few leaders intentionally build. 

    Deeply listen (not just actively)

    Most leaders can recite the definition of “active listening.” Carl Rogers and Richard Farson introduced it back in 1957 as a way of deeply understanding another person’s perspective. They described it as a tool that “requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from their point of view, just what it is they are communicating to us. More than that, we must convey to the speaker that we are seeing things from their point of view.” Rogers and Farson believed that those on the receiving end of this kind of listening cultivate emotional maturity, become less defensive, and develop better self-awareness.

    But here’s the challenge: in today’s distracted workplaces—Slack pings, hybrid meetings, compressed timelines—active listening often collapses into surface-level validation. 

    Let’s walk through an example. You’re in a 1:1 meeting with your newest hire. Halfway through the conversation, you say: “I hear you. It sounds like imposter syndrome is the issue, and you’re worried about not hitting the ground running in your new role.” It’s technically correct, but emotionally absent. Your hire heard your words, but doesn’t feel that you’ve truly empathized with her experience.

    Try this instead: “I can feel the nerves in your energy, and I know everything feels overwhelming right now. On one hand, it seems like you’re excited about the challenge ahead; on the other, you’re telling yourself a story that you’re not worthy of this role. Given you’ve never felt this way before joining a new company, I know this must be extremely challenging. Just know we deeply believe in you, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.”

    Deep listening transforms how people relate to you. Here, you’re empathizing with their experience, describing the energy you’re sensing and tapping into your intuition. Deep listening transforms how people relate to you. It helps new hires feel grounded. It builds rapport that lasts for years, not months. And in a world where employees increasingly doubt whether leaders truly understand them, empathy has become strategic. 

    The trust recession isn’t hypothetical. It’s showing up everywhere, with employees second-guessing leadership decisions, managers hesitant to communicate for fear of being misinterpreted, teams defaulting to short-term wins over long-term alignment, A.I.-driven workflows creating speed but also skepticism and uncertainty and noise drowning out nuance. 

    In this environment, people aren’t craving perfect leaders. They’re craving human ones—leaders with integrity, humility and presence. If you want to overcome the trust deficit inside your company, start by looking in the mirror. Trust is not rebuilt through memos, dashboards or A.I.-generated talking points. It’s rebuilt through daily behaviors, small moments and consistent humanity. When you embody the change you want others to follow, that’s where real impact begins. 

    Ravi Rajani is a global keynote speaker, communication expert, and the author of Relationship Currency: Five Communication Habits for Limitless Influence and Business Success 

    Inside the Trust Recession: What’s Driving the Crisis in Modern Leadership

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    Ravi Rajani

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  • The Silent Threat of Organizational Narcissism

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    Controlling narratives may protect image, but it erodes trust, blocks feedback and undermines performance. Unsplash+

    It’s almost like something out of the X-Files. Since the early 1980s, psychologists have been tracking something they just can’t explain in their data: a steady rise in levels of narcissism, in both individuals and organizations. A growing preoccupation with image and controlling what others say about us.

    Though social media is often blamed, the rise in narcissism began decades earlier. The exact causes remain debated, shifts in parenting, media and cultural values have all been cited. Whatever the reason, the consequence is clear. This subtle and silent global shift is undermining trust and information flow in the workplace, limiting leaders’ ability to ensure open communication and informed decision-making. It may be one of the least recognized yet most damaging threats to organizational performance facing leaders today. And it is almost entirely self-inflicted.

    The tenets of organizational narcissism

    The idea that organizations can be narcissistic as well as individuals dates back to the 1970s and 80s. It typically manifests in firms seeking visible loyalty from their employees, tightly managing what employees say about the firm and stressing conformity and “alignment.” Three main forces appear to have accelerated its rise: 

    • Growing individual narcissism. As levels of narcissism have risen in CEOs and other senior executives, they have pursued greater levels of loyalty and conformity in employees. Even when firms don’t explicitly demand this, employees—who are more image-conscious themselves—often assume it’s required. 
    • Rising brand exposure. The greater reputational risk created by the combination of the 24-hour news cycle, social media and call-out culture has heightened reputational risks, prompting firms to increasingly exert tighter control over both internal and external communications.
    • Over-curated positivity. The increasing push to foster motivational, upbeat workplaces has, in some cases, tipped over into over-managed messaging. Positivity is healthy, but when it silences openness, it creates a culture of suppression.  

    Dangerous consequences

    The fallout from organizational narcissism is predictable. It breeds insincerity and inauthenticity, as employees are encouraged to remain loyal and overtly positive, and discouraged from saying things that diverge from the company line. It erodes trust and impairs information flow as staff become cautious. Invariably, good news will travel fast while bad news gets buried, effectively undermining decision-making.

    One large global manufacturer illustrates the point. Three layers of leaders privately recognized flaws in a major transformation plan but stayed silent for fear of seeming disloyal and negative in a “can-do” culture. The result was stalled change, wasted costs and eventual abandonment of the strategy.

    How to navigate narcissism

    If organizational narcissism is usually unintentional, then what can leaders do to counteract it? The English writer Somerset Maugham once said, “What we call insincerity is often just a method by which we can avoid an unpleasantness.” By “unpleasantness,” he meant disagreement. And disagreement, handled constructively, is the antidote to organizational narcissism. Leaders must deliberately cultivate a culture of openness, debate and questioning. 

    Ask “What do you think?”

    Effective leaders make a habit of soliciting opinions. One CEO was so consistent in asking this question that anyone entering his office knew to have an opinion ready. He wasn’t concerned with agreement, only with engagement. The lesson: if you want people to speak up, then invite them to. Ask questions, lots of them. Seek out different views and opinions as if they are essential nourishment. Because for leaders, they are.

    Disagree positively

    When people do speak up, how leaders respond matters. This can be harder than it sounds, but negative or dismissive reactions can quickly silence voices. Adam Neumann, former CEO of WeWork, reportedly labeled executives and employees who urged him to take fewer risks as “B players” and excluded them from meetings. Perhaps they were being too cautious (though history suggests otherwise). But even so, this kind of reaction ensures leaders remain trapped in their own bubbles. Disagreement must be met with curiosity, not contempt. 

    Make dialogue a two-way street

    Some CEOs hold monthly Q&A sessions where employees are invited to ask questions—but the executives never pose any themselves. The result: one-way communication, centered on the CEO. A better approach is a balance where time in a town hall meeting is divided between fielding questions and asking employees for their perspectives on business issues..

    Embrace uncertainty

    The world is rarely black-and-white, yet leaders often feel compelled to project certainty. Presenting issues this way implies that there are right answers and wrong answers. Using qualifiers, where appropriate, can counter this. Instead of “It is this,” try “The most likely explanation is this.” Acknowledging nuance creates space for dialogue and reduces fears around being “wrong.” 

    The leadership imperative

    Organizational narcissism is rarely deliberate. Setting aside the egos of individual leaders, most cases stem from understandable, often well-intentioned attempts to either manage reputational risk or create a positive environment that go too far. But good intentions don’t erase damage. No matter how it arises, organizational narcissism undermines performance. Leaders who want lasting results must build cultures where openness, disagreement and authenticity aren’t just tolerated, but expected.

    Nik Kinley is a London-based leadership consultant, assessor and coach with 40 years’ experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies. An award-winning author, he has written eight books, the latest of which is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It, available now.

    The Silent Threat of Organizational Narcissism

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    Nik Kinley

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