Page 80 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

70 HBR Leader’s Handbook

experimentation can help you more deeply understand barriers to over-
come and the resources and systems for implementation at scale. It could
also highlight new aspects of value that you can package and sell, or add to
your marketing campaign.
You can use testing for any strategy-making process, though your
situation may call for different levels of rigor. Common practices include
setting up specific hypotheses to test, comparison between control groups
and groups experiencing the new product or service, iterative refinement of
the offering based on earlier rounds of testing, and so on. At key intervals,
your strategy-making team should reflect on what it’s learning and brain-
storm changes to improve chances of success.
The PBS KIDS 24/7 strategy mostly involved packaging and distrib-
uting content already known to member stations, so the team did only
minimal and informal testing of that, mostly by discussing sample pro-
gramming schedules with other leaders. But the incorporation of gaming
and digital streaming products was much more experimental, and the
team created some simple prototypes to help network executives under-
stand and critique the concept and to test it with target audiences. The
team also leveraged existing research funded by the US Department of
Education’s Ready to Learn grant, which validated the educational ben-
efits of combining broadcast programs with game play linked to the same
learning goals.

Avoid indecision
Testing, learning, and evolving a strategy must not, however, become an
excuse for extended indecision. As a leader you must be both open to new
ideas but also committed to action. You can’t develop strategic options for-
ever. At some point, you have to freeze the code and commit to a strategy,
or risk losing valuable momentum. Thus, at PBS, after a year of develop-
ment and testing, Kerger and the team officially launched PBS KIDS 24/7
in partnership with member stations.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t still seek learning and improvement even
after a strategy has been rolled out; it’s always right to correct missteps and
refine improvements over time. But after the initial process of development