Tech companies will often happily receive visitors from other businesses eager to understand what makes them so different from their own. Quite often, these touring executives visit various tech firms’ HQs scattered throughout the Bay Area, pointing out ping pong tables and taking photos of kooky office features that have come to epitomise (or even satirise) the tech industry.

Always though, there’s the same question at the heart of these trips: how can an established business change to be more disruptive or more agile than their competitors?

It’s a serious question for the research industry too. Firms often have to move faster than the speed of research and that forces them to look elsewhere for help. So, if you ever find stakeholders or clients asking the same questions about how to be faster or more innovative, point them to one thing: culture. 

This is not about suddenly embracing an initiative such as Google’s ‘20% time’, the idea that you need to spend a portion of your working hours on a side project that might become a valuable new proposition for your employer. Culture is defined by more than that. Specifically, there are two cultural pillars that tech companies prize and that I would encourage other brands or research teams to explore.

Commit to constant experimentation

Facebook’s oft-quoted mantra is ‘move fast and break things’. Similarly, emblazoned across the wall of every Twitter office are the words ‘innovate through experimentation’; a variation of this is similarly embedded in the DNA of all companies in the tech sector.

At every level of the firm, in every function and every location, you are expected to tweak something, to try something new, or to stop doing something to see what happens. The effects of these tests are rigorously analysed to understand what is beneficial to consumers and the business. 

There are dashboards that anyone can access to see the live results of the thousands of experiments running across the product at any given time. This mentality of testing and learning can be enormously effective in helping research teams innovate.

The next time you look at a research plan, try to see where you could test something. Use a different question wording for 10% of your sample and see if that reveals interesting quirks or biases in how consumers answer. Vary incentives, subject lines in emails, or try a different workshop technique on a focus group. 

Write an experimentation plan that runs throughout your project plan. Start debriefing not only the results of the research, but the results of these experiments too. The cumulative impact of constant  experimentation will not just be deeper insights into how consumers behave in research studies, but also discovering new approaches and methods to help optimise your projects or business operations.

Adopt a growth mindset

A few years ago, Jack Dorsey bought every Twitter employee a copy of Carol Dweck’s wildly successful book on ‘growth mindsets’, to ensure the entire firm understood what the culture of the company should look like.

This is an essential companion to constant experimentation. Simply put, it is critical not to view the results of experiments as either successes or failures. Embracing a growth mindset is to view all we do as simply opportunities to learn and grow as individuals and teams.

Creating an aura around success can act as a disincentive to experiment if someone thinks they might fail if they try something new. Only by neutrally analysing and learning from the results together, before moving on to the next test, can you truly encourage everyone to embrace experimentation.

Together, these two concepts work to create an environment where people feel free to innovate, where you constantly optimise your work and exponentially increase the knowledge base of your team or business. This is what defines tech-company culture more than the ping pong table.

Try them on your next project and let me know how you get on @mdtaylor.

Matt Taylor is consumer insight lead at Twitter