Test and Learn

"The phrase ‘test and learn’ in the UK public service sector is becoming commonplace. Some people are not fans: it’s too vague, it sounds too small and hesitant, or too akin to pilots (which it isn’t). I am a fan - two simple verbs and a conjunctive that mean what they say. That’s pretty novel in the world of transformation. 

"Refreshingly, it’s a phrase that does not come from any single profession. It does not belong to the world of technology (agile, SAFE, Kanban), project management (Prince, Lean), policy and strategy development (SWOT, Balanced Scorecard) or change management (Kotter’s 8-Step, McKinsey’s 7-S). There are no manuals, rules or professional accreditations...yet." 

Lara Sampson, Partner, Public Digital.

One of the biggest blockers to transformation is the brittle functional siloes of organisations, often reinforced by their favourite tools and methods. Test and learn, by contrast, is a way of thinking that can be widely understood, is relevant across whole organisations and even wider systems, and is inherently inclusive - if we take care to keep it so.

So there is a moment, a window of opportunity, when all the professions - the policy makers and the strategists, the technologists and the designers, the procurement specialists and the lawyers, the people professionals and the accountants, the operational delivery experts and the communicators - can corral around a simple, single concept: “We will succeed by testing and learning, changing and adapting, continuously improving in a never ending loop to reach our goal.

This collection of articles by my colleagues at Public Digital unpacks what we mean when we talk about test and learn. They offer guidance for how to adopt a test and learn mindset, they give language to the many practices that support this approach, and hopefully they convey some of its potential for creating momentum in transformation.