Companies find that corporate culture often proves to be the biggest obstacle to scaling up experimentation. Shared behaviors, beliefs and values can make it difficult to create an experiment culture. In the final part of the series on the conditions for an experimentation culture, I will take a closer look at the Centre of Excellence.

Before I continue, a brief recap of the previous three articles. These are the conditions for an experimentation culture that I have covered before:

1. Mindset: Three mindsets are essential to achieve an experimentation culture; an experimentation mindset, a growth mindset and a learning mindset.
2. Organizational structure: In the ideal situation, cross-functional teams work together on the same goals, sharing information and resources freely between teams.
3. Leadership: when experimentation is fully democratized, anyone can set up an experiment and make decisions based on the results without senior management approval.

The fourth and final condition is the presence of a Center of Excellence. I'd love to tell you more about that. Let's dive in!

Centre of Excellence versus other organizational models

Once management recognizes the value of experimentation to the entire organization and commits to scaling up experimentation capacity, management can organize its experimentation staff in three ways. According to Thomke in his book Experimentation Works, these are:
- A centralized model
- A decentralized model
- A center of excellence model.

Centralized model: good for small organizations

In a centralized model, a team of specialists conducts experiments for the entire company. The team can, of course, involve other colleagues by holding brainstorming sessions, for example. However, the centralized team manages the entire execution and resources of experiments.

A centralized team can focus on long-term projects, improving the company's experiments. Projects can include building an experimentation tool, developing advanced algorithms, data quality, documentation and automation. The team also acts as a central point of contact.

The main drawback is that business units may have different priorities, which can lead to conflicts over resource and cost allocation. These can create resistance to experimentation, making it impossible for the team to do their job. The centralized team may have no connection to the business units, be less aligned with the goals and lack specific domain expertise.

I have seen this model work in practice for smaller organizations. In these types of organizations, communication is more informal, there is little hierarchy and there are only a few business units. To get the most out of experimentation, the business units must eventually experiment on their own, resulting in a hybrid structure.

Decentralized model: experts without central responsibility

In a decentralized model, different CRO specialists or leads operate in different teams. Each specialist is responsible for the experiments conducted in their business unit. There is no centralized team. Compared to the centralized model, the main advantage is that specialists become experts in their domain. They are also more aligned with the goals of the business unit and more connected to the team members who are part of it.

Some drawbacks often include a lack of information sharing among CRO specialists and no central responsibility for long-term issues such as tooling, documentation and automation. In addition to inefficiencies in the process, this also limits the team's ability to learn.

Centre of Excellence model: best of both worlds

Finally, there is a Centre of Excellence model. In this situation, some experimentation specialists operate in a centralized function and other specialists within the various business units.

What is the benefit of a Centre of Excellence model?

The Center of Excellence supports the specialists in the business units, works on long-term projects to improve the company's experiments and is responsible for tooling and data quality. In addition, the specialists in the business units deal with day-to-day operations in the field of experimentation.

The Center of Excellence model combines the advantages of central and decentralized models. As a central point of contact, it can promote experimentation and strengthen the culture of experimentation. By organizing events, workshops and trainings. The specialists in the business units become experts in their domain. They are more aligned with the domain goals and more connected to the team members in their business units.

Key tasks for the CoE

There may be a need for more clarity about what the Center of Excellence owns and what the business units own. For example, who is responsible for hiring specialists and who pays for tooling? Based on my experience and many papers and articles I have consulted, I find the CoE model most successful in achieving a culture of experimentation. In addition, I find it most efficient in the speed and quality of experimentation. Therefore, I am happy to dive a little deeper into it.

The Center of Excellence should be responsible for the speed and quality of experimentation in the organization. This includes the experimentation tool, stats engine, data quality, automation, documentation and other tools used by the specialists.

Seven tasks of the Center of Excellence

In addition, the Center of Excellence has seven important tasks to motivate and enable colleagues to conduct as many experiments as possible in the safest and highest quality way possible. I list them for you below:

1. Make experimentation easy and accessible
The most important task is to make experimentation as easy as possible. If something is easy to do, it is more likely to stick and become a habit.

There are several ways the CoE can accomplish this, according to James Clear in his fantastic book Atomic Habits:

• Start with repetition, not perfection: Let people go through the experimentation process several times before quality improves
• Reduce friction
• Standardize the process
• Start small

2. Training
The CoE can make experimentation as easy as possible and increase quality through education. Customized education is essential to onboarding new teams, keeping the advanced experimentation teams up to date with their knowledge and working more efficiently. Training can also be part of the onboarding process of new employees in the company. This can take the form of workshops, manuals, coaching and having an expert work with a team just starting out. It is crucial for testing the right hypotheses and reliable experiments.

3. Bring people together
The Centre of Excellence should bring together experimentation specialists and enthusiasts. By creating a community, people can motivate, support and learn from each other and facilitate organizational change together. So above all, bring people together through recurring meetings and brainstorming sessions, attend conferences together, chat channels or work in the same space.

4. Ensure safety
Psychological safety benefits organizations and teams in many different ways. Psychological safety is showing and engaging oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career (Kahn 1990, p. 708). Specific to experimentation, this means: people will go against the status quo if they feel psychologically safe. They will also be more successful at experimenting, learn more from failed experiments and be more innovative (Detert & Edmondson, 2006 & Morrison, 2011). This means, for example, that they devise experiments that test new ideas.

5. Ensure effectiveness
Employees will not contribute to experiments if they do not believe the results will make a difference (Morrison, 2011). The center of expertise must ensure that the results of experiments are accepted throughout the company. Otherwise, people will stop coming up with ideas and experiments.

Since the Center of Excellence often lacks the mandate, providing effectiveness and education is a must to convince stakeholders and senior management.

6. Give sufficient autonomy
People want to be in control and don't particularly like being told what to do. People do not like to be managed and want to follow their own direction (Slemp et al., 2018). By allowing people to make relevant decisions independently, COE promotes intrinsic motivation to experiment.

7. Encourage a culture of experimentation
Finally, the Center of Excellence should foster a culture of experimentation throughout the organization and be the point of contact for (senior) management. The team can do this by getting management buy-in, having a clear vision, writing a strategic plan, applying change management and motivating colleagues through the above tasks.

CoE as an incentive for experimentation
The Centre of Excellence model is best for successfully getting organizations into a culture of experimentation. Members of the Centre of Excellence should make experimentation as easy as possible so that each employee can conduct experiments independently and make decisions based on the outcome.

In conclusion

Want to learn more about Centre of Excellence or working on a culture of experimentation? Or would you like me to look with you in your organization? If so, leave me a message.