Experimentation Over Presentation: Your Strategy Should Survive the Real World

In 1983, Scott Cook and Tom Proulx set out to build a new software application. The goal was to create a program that would help ordinary people manage their money. Their product wasn’t the first of its kind—it wasn’t even the tenth. But what set them apart was their approach to developing it.

Cook had come out of Procter & Gamble, where consumer testing shaped everything the company touched. Whether it was diapers or dish soap, the method was the same. Instead of arguing about what customers wanted, they watched them. They paid attention to consumers’ behaviors: what confused them, what slowed them down, and where their behavior diverged from what might have been expected.

That discipline didn’t exist yet in software development. Programs were built and shipped with enormous energy but very little customer input. The people writing the code were usually writing for people like themselves. No one was sitting with everyday users. No one was running structured experiments. The very idea of what would later be called user testing barely existed.

Cook and Proulx didn’t have money for formal research, so they improvised. They reached out to the local Junior League to meet women who didn’t own computers but were willing to help. These were the very people who might one day use their product. They invited each of them into a small room, sat them in front of their crude prototype, and asked them to perform a few simple tasks.

Cook was sure that their product was intuitive because it made sense to him. Then he watched. Almost immediately, the women struggled. They hesitated. They got lost. They made errors Cook never imagined. Cook and Proulx took notes, asked questions, and went back to fix what they could. And they did it again and again.

Those early prototypes became the product we now know as Quicken. Quicken worked differently from other financial software. Where most applications looked like an accounting spreadsheet, Quicken looked like the ledger people used to balance their checkbooks. That familiarity drastically reduced its barriers to adoption.

Over the next three decades, Cook’s tiny startup, Intuit, grew into a $20 billion company, employing nearly eight thousand people, and offering powerhouse products like Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks.

And that’s when Cook realized he had a problem.

As Intuit had grown, hierarchy had settled in. Meetings had become more formal. Presentations had become more polished. The most interesting ideas were still coming from people who were close to Intuit’s customers and close to the work. But their ideas then got forced into a formal decision-making process. Teams would prepare their slides, rehearse their arguments, and make a case for why the company should fund their proposal. And some of the teams were asking for a lot of money. If he was being honest, Cook had to admit that he didn’t actually know which of those ideas would work. So, he decided to change the game.

Cook realized they needed to get back to their roots. Intuit needed to shift from a place where the best presentation won to a place where the best experimentation won. Rather than focusing on making sound arguments, teams needed to get out and try something in the real world.

If a team believed in an idea that ran against the current way of thinking, Cook didn’t ask for more slides. He gave them a little money and asked them to design a real-world test. Could they build a version of the idea that customers would experience as real, even if the underlying product was still a prototype? Could they put their leap-of-faith assumptions in front of the world and see what happened?

He called this shift “Decision by Experiment.” Instead of debating assumptions, you tested them. Instead of predicting how customers might behave, you watched what they actually did. Evidence began to replace eloquence. The act of experimentation created its own kind of honesty. When a prototype fell flat, there was no need for a post-mortem meeting to argue about whether it had worked. The customers had already delivered the verdict. And when something worked, even in rough form, the evidence spoke for itself.

The Leadership Bottleneck

Today, many of us operate in a system that demands decisions at a pace previous generations would find untenable. Calendars are packed with back-to-back meetings. Each session arrives with dense materials and a team hoping for a clear answer. Leaders are expected to absorb, interpret, and make big decisions in the space of thirty or sixty minutes.

It’s a rhythm that rewards decisiveness more than understanding. There’s rarely time to sit with an idea, rarely room to explore it outside the walls of the building, and rarely space to design a small test in the real world. The work starts to feel like intellectual triage. What’s most urgent surfaces. What’s most polished survives. Leaders become the bottleneck for moving forward.

Teams can feel this bottleneck when their best ideas are in limbo. Leaders feel it when they’re asked to approve something they don’t fully understand but can’t afford to delay. The organization feels it in the form of slower progress and rising frustration.

Amazon tried to solve this problem by eliminating PowerPoint entirely. At Amazon, decisions are framed in six-page memos. The memo is a tightly written narrative that forces the author to think with clarity and structure. When the meeting begins, everyone spends the first twenty minutes reading in silence. Only after that does the discussion start.

It’s a remarkable improvement over a long march through bullet points and charts. But a memo is still a presentation. It describes the world instead of testing it. It’s an argument, not a presentation of evidence. Even the best-crafted narrative can only predict. It can’t prove. And strategic decisions are by definition steps into the unknown. Hundred-page strategy decks are high-resolution rear-view mirrors, not crystal balls.

In the end, the group is still choosing between competing stories about how the future might unfold. When the arguments on both sides of an issue sound smart, how do you know who’s right? Scott Cook’s answer is disarmingly simple. Whenever possible, stop settling decisions with presentations and start settling them with experiments.

A Lesson from the Quality Revolution

The idea of structured experimentation didn’t originate in Silicon Valley. It came into business through the quality revolution in manufacturing. Factories were wrestling with complex problems that didn’t yield to intuition or to the loudest voice in the room. Leaders needed to know which factors truly mattered, and guessing the way forward was just too expensive.

Enter Keki Bhote, one of the earliest and most forceful champions of statistical experimentation in American industry. Bhote spent decades at Motorola, not in a lab but on the factory floor. He worked on real problems where yield, reliability, and cost all hung in the balance. His contribution was to bring the discipline of statistics into everyday decisions.

Bhote taught teams how to isolate variables, design disciplined trials, and let data rather than seniority determine what happened next. His approach, known as Design of Experiments, helped factories learn which changes moved the needle and which did nothing at all. Plants didn’t improve because leaders argued harder or wrote sharper memos. They improved because they learned faster. Bhote’s approach eventually made its way into the kind of A/B market testing that many companies use today.

Bringing Experimentation into Strategy

The same discipline that transformed manufacturing can transform strategy. Great experimentation starts with some broader exploration. This might look like consumer insights work, competitor benchmarking, or a technology scan. The point is to discover what the world has to teach you. Use that information to formulate your plan.

Then, it’s time to articulate the idea. Rather than trying to make an airtight case in a hundred-page deck, teams can lay out what they’re trying to achieve in ten pages. It doesn’t need to be polished. It doesn’t need a perfect narrative. It just needs to be clear.

The last page should show how the team plans to find out whether what they’ve said is right. Identify the handful of assumptions that matter most. Every strategy has them: the leap-of-faith conditions that, if wrong, bring the whole idea down. Name them explicitly. Then design small, fast, inexpensive ways to test them. Put the idea into the world in a form that feels real to customers and watch what they actually do.

For their part, decision makers can then respond more like venture capitalists. They can give a little bit of time and a small amount of money to run the experiments. Don’t ask teams for more information. Don’t opine on whether you think it’s a good idea. Just let people give it a try.

Run a test in the world. Not a simulation. Not a thought exercise. A real interaction with real customers or real technology, where the uncertainty is exposed rather than hidden. After each test, update the plan. Strengthen the parts the evidence supports. Adjust the parts where reality disagrees. Learn enough to justify the next small round of resources.

When strategies are tested this way, they stop being static documents and start becoming living systems. After every experiment, the plan gets updated. The parts that the evidence supports become stronger. The parts that reality pushes back on get revised or removed. Only when an idea has survived a few cycles of learning does it make sense to ask for more resources.

Learning in Motion

Uncertainty used to feel like something leaders needed to eliminate. Today, it’s the raw material of progress. The world is shifting too quickly for static plans or airtight logic. Assumptions age fast. Customer expectations evolve faster. Markets shift faster still. In that kind of environment, the leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who guess well. They’re the ones who learn well. They treat every initiative as a series of questions to be explored rather than a bet to be defended.

Choosing experimentation over presentation is more than a way to evaluate strategic options. It’s a way to build a culture that learns while in motion. A place where teams move with curiosity and humility, and where leaders trade the illusion of certainty for the clarity that comes from watching something real happen in the world.

Scott Cook likes to say that Intuit became Intuit because it learned faster than the world around it. That didn’t come from a brilliant pitch or a flawless deck. It came from a small room, a rough prototype, and the humility to watch real people struggle. That lesson still holds. When organizations stop performing and start learning, the path forward becomes clearer. In a future that refuses to sit still, clarity may be the most valuable resource a leader can have.