Why test and learn is the competitive advantage every business needs

This article is included in our book, Adopting the practice of test and learn. It was written by Linda Essen-Möller.

You can download a PDF version of this book, or visit this page to request a printed copy.

The rate of change businesses face today is no longer linear - it’s exponential. AI is compressing timelines, disrupting operating models, and redrawing the expectations of customers and colleagues in real time. Success in a competitive and fast-evolving market depends not on having the best five-year plan or static target operating model, but on an organisation's ability to sense, test and adapt faster than the competition.

Yet many large businesses continue to struggle - not for lack of ambition, but because execution rarely matches intent.

Too often, transformation in commercial organisations is led top-down, anchored in rigid models and strategic roadmaps designed for control and stability, not for speed and adaptability. But what works on a spreadsheet rarely survives contact with the complexity of real teams, systems and customer demands. Without practical investment in team readiness, even the best strategy fails to land.

This is where a test and learn approach becomes a game-changer. While often associated with the public sector, this way of working is quietly delivering major benefits in commercial organisations too.

Working with BT to test and learn

The challenges above were familiar at BT Group, one of the UK’s largest telecoms providers and our client since 2023. With new leadership in place, BT set out to overhaul its operating model - breaking down silos and shifting to agile, service-aligned teams.

Our work with them revealed four powerful ways that test and learn creates competitive advantage:

Test and learn mitigates risk, giving teams a safe environment to experiment, adapt and build practical capability where it matters most.

Organisations must constantly adapt and experiment to stay ahead of the curve. Test and learn enables teams to try new ways of working, trial emerging technologies, and adapt delivery methods in context - building real capability, not just buying it. Instead of betting big on untested assumptions, businesses can start small - in a low-risk area - and scale what works. This de-risks change and develops the capacity to flex and respond: generating real-time data and proving impact before investing more.

At BT, we used a test and learn approach to help transform a rigid target operating model by establishing ‘beacon projects’: focused teams testing new methods in real delivery contexts. The beacons not only provided a space where ways of working and redesigned processes could be trialled and refined, but they helped de-risk changes to BT’s operating model, testing new structures and agile practices before wider adoption. This strengthened compliance and governance by embedding secure, adaptive ways of working into the delivery process.

More broadly, a test and learn approach also mitigates risk in digital delivery and strategic decision-making. By enabling teams to validate customer needs early, this approach reduces the risk of building features or services that miss the mark, and the risk of overcommitting to ideas that look good on paper but falter in practice. Strategic hypotheses - such as new market opportunities, pricing models or operating structures - can be tested in controlled environments before significant investment.

Crucially, test and learn provides a space in which emerging technologies or vendors can be trialled safely, surfacing integration issues, capability gaps or hidden cost. Those are particularly vital when exploring AI, where risks like user trust, bias, and team readiness are best addressed experimentally.

Test and learn allows businesses to reshape the way their teams operate, unlocking opportunities for cost-saving and productivity improvements.

Too often, the customer’s end-to-end experience is overlooked and organisations forget to ask: What are the services we’re delivering, and how should our teams be shaped to support that?

Test and learn exposes these blind spots. It allows you to reimagine team structures based on real service flows and outcomes, rather than internal needs.

At BT, we helped introduce multidisciplinary teams and a test and learn approach to shift the focus from outputs to outcomes. This empowered teams to work across the end-to-end journey, improving autonomy, planning and communication. As a result, BT saw a 23% increase in productivity within the Business Marketplace and an opportunity to cut product feature delivery cycles in one of the beacon projects from 9–18 months to just 2–3 months, representing an 83% improvement. The result was millions in annual savings.

As well as productivity and cost-saving improvements like these, reimagining team structures around services - rather than standalone projects - creates a compounding return on every new initiative. Whereas funding projects or specific outputs demands the expense of onboarding consultants, building context, and resetting delivery rhythms for every new project, funding service-oriented teams helps retain institutional knowledge and reduce onboarding overheads, minimising costs and increasing impact.