How To Lead A Quest

Part IV Crafting Experiments

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 ...