BUSINESS NEWS LESSONS

Trial and error paves the way to success

1 Warmer

a. Discuss this business scenario with a partner. Ask and answer the questions below.

You work for a startup that sells digital tools for education. During the pandemic, you started selling
new products and came up with new solutions. This meant that the company grew a lot. Since,
you are only trying to meet customer demands and not working on new products or improving the
products you currently offer.

1. How can you set aside resources to keep on experimenting?

2. Do you think experimenting is a good way to achieve success in business, or is it better to play it safe?

2 Key words

a. Write the words from the box next to the definitions below.
Check your answers and your understanding of the words by using the same word to complete
the example sentence under each definition. You may have to change the form of the word.
Then read the complete article to see how each of the key words is used in context.

condemn    predictable    record    revert to    trial    trigger

1. the information that exists about a person or company and their past actions

The company has a worryingly bad safety .

2. force to experience or cause to be destroyed

The strategy is to fail if it doesn’t consider some of the

market research.

3. the process of testing a product, plan, or person over a period of time

There is a new to test a plastic-free version of the pen.

4. something that produces an immediate result

Intermediate

Some people say that a single social media post was the main for the

drop in share price.

5. happening in the way that you would expect

While we can forecast future sales based on past performance, sales aren’t always

.
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 BUSINESS NEWS LESSONS

6. return to a previous state or way of behaving, often one that is not good

Everyone was very motivated after the team building exercise, but things soon

their old mediocre state.

mindset   paralysed   pilot   permissionless   perpetual   unconstrained

7. the process of trying something with a small group of people to find out if it would be successful or

popular

I have been invited to participate in a six-month of a new fitness app.

8. a way of thinking about things

People who have a growth believe that they can work to improve their

skills and abilities.

9. behaving in a way that is not controlled or limited

When we offered him a permanent position, he reacted with joy.

10. a system for organising people according to their status in a society, organisation, or other group

A flatter is better for faster problem-solving and decision-making.

11. continuing all the time

We have switched from a periodic to a inventory system.

12. unable to move, think, or operate normally or efficiently

She was by the success of her first book on management.

Intermediate

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 BUSINESS NEWS LESSONS

How to ensure experiments leave the

launch pad
COMPANIES ADVANCE BY TRIAL AND ERROR, BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE PART OF THE ‘ERROR’

ANDREW HILL

1 “Flight heritage” is how the commercial space industry 6 That is a view shared by Phil Libin, co-founder of
likes to describe a record of success established by a mobile app Evernote, who now runs All Turtles, a
string of missions for a satellite or a launch system. product studio that has adopted distributed working.
The company has just implemented a seasonal
2 The phrase cropped up last week in postmortems of structure, in which employees commit to a six-month
Virgin Orbit’s failure to launch the first commercial stretch at the company, followed by a two-week
satellites from western Europe. “Space is hard,” said holiday taken at the same time by everyone. Libin
Alice Bunn, president of UK trade body UKspace, freely admits it is a trial: “It’s guaranteed that in a
after an “anomaly” condemned the LauncherOne season or two we will say ‘some of these things don’t
rocket and its expensive payload to a fiery end make sense, we have to change it’.”
before it reached its target orbit.
7 All Turtles has more flexibility than many to use itself
3 What this blot on Virgin Orbit’s heritage underlined as a laboratory. “Once we become a big company
was the inevitable commercial tension between then predictability of execution is rewarded much
experimentation and predictability. Pioneering space more by markets and we’ll have to experiment less,”
ventures are in a constant cycle of “working out Libin says.
what happened and getting up and trying again”, to
paraphrase Bunn. Trial and error is how they advance, 8 But much larger groups can also pilot new ideas,
but terrestrial companies are not so different. In both without betting the house. Unilever was able to test
cases, customers would prefer not to be on board for a radical shift to a four-day working week with an
the “error” part. The challenge is deciding when to 18-month pilot in New Zealand, before rolling it out to
crystallise the findings of the experiment. some employees in Australia last year.

4 Back on Earth, the pandemic was a trigger for 9 Elon Musk, who, through his leadership of SpaceX,
forced experimentation at many companies that had knows more than most about how hard space is, has
previously assumed the status quo in how, where, also brought real-time testing into the open at Twitter.
and when we work was immutable. Now they have The debate between those who want him to leave the
to decide when to incorporate changes in working familiar, predictable features of their favourite social
practices into a more predictable framework. Even media platform alone and those who applaud a state
the World Economic Forum was obliged to try out of rolling revolution has been vocal.
a summer summit in 2022, before reverting to its
regular January timetable. One question is whether 10 The cost and risk of a “perpetual pilot” approach
corporate leaders will return to the Alps this week are clearly lower for a digital company, which can
more open to the need to experiment or keener than change the customer experience at the touch of a
ever to revert to pre-Covid certainties. button, or test multiple options simultaneously. Yet
experimentation is a mindset unconstrained by a
Intermediate

5 “It’s very risky not to experiment,” claims Costas company’s size, age, or sector. Whatever they think of
Andriopoulos, innovation and entrepreneurship Musk as chief executive, other companies could learn
professor at Bayes Business School and author from Musk the experimenter’s effort to involve users
of Purposeful Curiosity. Teams that were curious, in his experiments.
open-minded, and accepting of failure responded
better to the sudden lockdowns of 2020, he believes.
“If you don’t experiment for a long time, then you bet
the house and you either win, or lose everything.”
Continued on next page
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 BUSINESS NEWS LESSONS

11 In the latest edition of Harvard Business Review, Glossary

Rita McGrath and Ram Charan write about how pioneering: done for the first time using new methods
digital technology can liberate managers and their
teams to experiment in so-called “permissionless postmortem: a discussion or examination to find out
corporations”, characterised by flatter hierarchies, why an event happened, especially an event that
faster decision-making, and better customer produced bad results
relationships. They cite retailer Amazon, lift maker status quo: the present situation, or the way that
Kone and fund manager Fidelity as companies that things usually are
have changed the pace and nature of the work
they do using technology. “In the permissionless
corporation, fast, inexpensive experimentation
takes over from slow, involved analysis, enabling
organisations to pounce on opportunities as they
arise,” they write.

12 There are pitfalls to running a company on perpetual

pilot. Andriopoulos says sometimes managers “hide
behind a lot of experiments because they don’t want
to move ahead and take a decision”. Eventually,
Virgin Orbit and its partners will take another shot at
re-establishing their flight heritage. But they should
not stop experimenting. The alternative, as Libin says,
would be “to be paralysed by not knowing what would
go wrong”.

Andrew Hill, 15 January, 2023

© The Financial Times.
All rights reserved.
Articles republished from the Financial Times.
Intermediate

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3 Understanding the article

a. Find key information in the article to fill the gaps in the notes.

Alice Bunn All Turtles Costas Andriopoulos Elon Musk LauncherOne

Phil Libin Rita McGrath and Ram Charan

1. thinks trial and error is a normal part of space ventures.

2. recommend using digital technology to speed up decision

making to make the most of new opportunities.

3. Employees at work for six months and then all take two weeks
of leave together.

4. thinks sometimes too much experimenting can be a way to

avoid making difficult decisions.

5. The author thinks that is a good example of someone who

involves users in the testing process.

6. Virgin Orbit’s first commercial satellite, the , exploded

after launch.

7. believes businesses with a culture that is accepting of failure

did better in the pandemic.

4 Business language

a. Join the nouns to make business and space terms from the article. Then find them in the
article to check your answers and read them again in context.

1. flight body

2. launch experience

3. trade heritage
Intermediate

4. target orbit

5. space studio

6. product system

7. customer venture
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 BUSINESS NEWS LESSONS

b. Match the definitions to the words from Activity 4a.

a. a group of people who are connected in some way, often because they are involved in buying and
selling goods and services

b. a company or a place in a company where new products are designed

c. the overall experience that someone has when using a product

d. a record of success established by a string of missions for a satellite or a launch system

e. a set of pieces of equipment or computer programs that work together to send a missile, space
vehicle, satellite, or other object into the air or into space

f. a new business or activity in the space sector

g. the path planned to be taken by an object moving around a larger object in space

c. Now explain how the phrases above were used in the article.

5 Discussion

a. Discuss these statements and give reasons for your opinions.

• “We make the most progress through trial and error.”

• “It’s very risky not to experiment.”

• “It’s best to make decisions without getting stuck in constant experimentation.”

6 Wider business theme – critical thinking & problem solving

a. Choose an area of opportunity in your organisation. Answer the questions to analyse and
propose a possible solution or improvement.

1. What solution would you like to pilot?

2. What are the risks of failure?

3. What are the risks of not experimenting?

4. What could be gained through trial and error?

Intermediate

5. How exactly would you set up a trial?

b. Create an infographic to pilot your proposal. Try to be as persuasive as possible and use
language from the previous activities.
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Useful language

I would like to address the problem of …

I propose a trial in which we …

While the outcome is not predictable, not experimenting means …

I believe this would improve (the customer experience, etc)

The pilot would consist of …

We can … This could be followed by …

To sum up, …
Intermediate

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