Companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, General Electric (GE) and HubSpot have famously harnessed a culture of experimentation and continual testing to drive growth in their organisations.

source

But what exactly is a culture of experimentation, and how does it differ from the performance culture of many organisations today?

What is culture?

Let's start by understanding what we mean by culture. Whilst definitions vary, they generally all centre around:

1. Shared beliefs and values

2. Shared behaviours and group norms

These elements determine how people interact and make decisions.

"The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterises an institution or organisation"

Marriam Webster Dictionary

Culture and strategy

Culture and strategy can both be used to increase organisational effectiveness but are rarely seen as interrelated, perhaps due to their differences.

• Strategy: Formal logic, written plans and choices, owned by the leader, defined quarterly or yearly, explicit.

• Culture: Shared values and beliefs, unspoken behaviours and group norms, a group phenomenon, endures longer term, implicit and subliminal.

In most marketing organisations strategy dominates conversations around team performance however your growth marketing strategy is likely to fail, or at best be far less effective, without the right culture to support it.

Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker famously remarked that "culture eats strategy for breakfast", not to diminish the importance of strategy, but rather to shine a light on culture as a critical element to success.

Performance culture

A performance culture is one that focuses on high performance with regard to achieving specific business outcomes.

Characteristics of a typical performance culture include a focus on:

1. Intellect, knowledge and expertise

2. Business goals and outcomes

3. Results

4. Measurable targets

5. Driven individuals

6. Identifying winners and losers

Often these kinds of environments can result in controlling, high-pressure and intense environments where there is an aversion to conflict. They can be environments in which people hold onto age-old beliefs and outdated ways of doing things.

Performance cultures also result in self-protective behaviours such as being self-centred, overconfident and focused on protecting and elevating individual reputations.

"Building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth."

Tony Schwartz

Culture of experimentation

In a culture of experimentation (or growth culture) results still matter, but there is more focus on the softer elements of the organisational environment.

Characteristics of a typical culture of experimentation include a focus on:

1. A safe environment that supports risk taking

2. Treating failures as opportunities to learn and improve

3. Focusing on development opportunities

4. Providing continuous feedback up, down and across the organisation

5. Challenging each other

6. A shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better

Often these kinds of environments have a feeling of transparency, safety, trust and vulnerability that doesn't exist in more controlled performance cultures. Leaders take responsibility for their shortcomings and regularly seek out others' opinions and ideas to challenge the status quo and find new ways of doing things.

Alex Birkett, previously Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot and now co-founder of Omniscient Digital, defines a culture of experimentation as:

A belief that there aren’t any sacred cows in terms of the way things are done or designed. An opinion, no matter how highly paid, is still an opinion – instead, an organisation makes data-informed decisions.

In a culture of experimentation, failure isn’t punished, insights and learning are rewarded, and team members are encouraged to innovate and discover new ways of growth.

Experimentation culture operating principles

Culture is often seen as somewhat intangible and difficult to describe hence we recommend most growth marketing teams define core operating principles instead.

Stripe, the hugely successful payments platform, take a similar approach with regard to "How Stripe works":

Stripe’s operating principles guide how we interact with each other and our users, translating our values and beliefs into concrete actions. The principles articulated here detail the everyday behaviors we focus on, our core traits, and what we expect of our leaders—and all are rooted in the core expectation that Stripes operate with high integrity, maturity, and respect for others at all times.

How Stripe works

Here are 10 rules and operating principles you may wish to adopt within your growth marketing team in order to be more effective at driving business results.

1. Think small

2. Move fast

3. Avoid shiny objects

4. Data over opinions

5. Challenge the status quo

6. Build process excellence

7. Learnings beat outcomes

8. Customers first

9. Team transparency

10. Autonomy and accountability

1 Think small

Start with small bets, get real-world feedback quickly, and double-down on successes. Great outcomes are often the result of endless iteration.

2 Move fast

Prioritise velocity over perfection. Learnings and excellence are the result of action, data collection, and iteration.

3 Avoid shiny objects

Avoid shiny objects where there isn't clear business impact. Always focus on outcomes over outputs.

4 Data over opinions

Remove ego from decision making and instead aim to always validate with empirical evidence.

5 Challenge the status quo

Use experimentation as a tool to challenge the widely held assumptions, ways of working and organisational norms.

6 Build process excellence

Winning growth teams are religious about process.

7 Learnings beat outcomes

"What did we learn?" is far more powerful than "What did we do?"

8 Customers first

Obsess over customer problems, customer needs and customer problems.

9 Transparency

Share information about experiments, results and learnings with your team and stakeholders.

10 Autonomy and accountability

With autonomy comes accountability.

Final thoughts

Organisational culture is a complex and nuanced topic. A culture of experimentation (or growth culture) isn't new, but is becoming more prominent.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.