Experiment [noun]: a course of action tentatively adopted without being certain of the outcome.

Assuming that you're maintaining an active quest towards relevance and new value — and that you've been monitoring commonincoherencies across various possible future contexts — you'll have a quiver of options. If signs suggest that a particular future context is likely to manifest, we then must seek to ensure that the strategic options we have generated are viable.

So far, Quest-Augmented Strategy may seem as though you're just postulating about the future. It almost conjures an image of wizards debating from within an ivory tower (which has a telescope and astrological charts), goblets of brandy in hand, stroking beards and harrumphing verily. And while the wizard in us might find this quite admirable, our inner rogue knows that we can't stay still. At some point, we need to shift from exploration to experimentation.

Experiments translate pioneering thinking into pioneering doing. They enable us to begin to validate these potentially uncharted and unprecedented pathways, to ensure that they are viable. They also enable us to tackle the legitimate questions and concerns that we anticipate our peers and other decision-makers will have. Through ongoing experimentation and learning, an enterprise is primed to execute pioneering strategy.

This process is much akin to scouting out a new path. In ye olde war times, pioneering leaders would utilise scouts, rangers and pathfinders — folks who would advance ahead of the troops in order to ensure that the way forward was clear and safe.^[1] In modern business times, pioneering leaders have internal experiments and embedded intrapreneurial hubs (code for ‘startups') to explore and test the validity of strategic options.

We are about to enter interesting territory.

Some enterprises still have an unhealthy obsession with ‘ideas' and cherrypicking buzzwords. Before you know it, people will be espousing lean pivots with agility while looking to build the next killer app, iteratively putting the customer at the heart of the experience, and so on. Many shiny objects and convenient, pre-packaged solutions can distract us from good thinking. And so, in part IV, we navigate through this mess to find the options most viable.