Building a testing culture that outlasts its champion

You can’t decree a testing culture. Put a slide in a town hall saying from now on we test everything and what you get is compliance, which stops the moment nobody’s watching. Culture is what people do when nobody’s making them. You build it by making testing the easier thing to do, and the thing that gets rewarded.

The most common way it fails is the single champion. One person believes in testing, runs all the tests, makes the case in every meeting, and the programme lives on their energy. The day they leave, burn out or lose one argument too many, the programme ends. A culture is what’s left when the champion isn’t in the room, so building one means making the champion unnecessary. They can keep making the case. The aim is for other people to hold the same reasons.

That happens through a few small, concrete habits that are easy to overlook. Share the learnings as well as the wins, somewhere the whole business can see them, so a result from the checkout team informs the pricing team. Bring people into ideation before the test exists, so it carries something of theirs and a loss lands as a shared outcome rather than one person’s failure. Reward a loss the same way as a win, because the loss is what told you not to spend the money. None of these is remarkable on its own, but together they change what people think testing is for.

Resistance usually comes from people who feel tested rather than testing. Build a culture on telling people their instinct is wrong and everyone whose instinct has been questioned will push back. It works better to treat intuition as the raw material, the source of hypotheses, with testing as the way to check it. People who feel their judgement is respected will offer it freely. People who feel it’s on trial will keep it to themselves, and once nobody offers a view, testing has already lost.

The other way it fails is the culture that tests but never learns. The tool is installed, the tests run on schedule, and every result goes into a folder nobody reads. From the outside it looks like a culture, but the learning is what makes one, and here there isn’t any. If a result doesn’t change a decision, it was a formality. So build the habit of acting on what you learn. A group of people who keep finding out they were wrong, and changing what they do because of it, won’t need telling to test.

Put it to work

Pick one habit to start this month, sharing a loss as visibly as a win, or bringing someone into ideation early. Do that one thing, consistently.

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Sources

1. Stefan Thomke, Experimentation Works