Building a Culture of Experimentation – A TriAgile 2025 Story
- Ashish Bhojane
- May 2
- 4 min read
On Thursday, April 24th, 2025, I stood before thirty experienced Agilists at TriAgile 2025, ready to run a workshop I had been shaping in my mind (and heart) for months: "Building a Culture of Experimentation."
The conference theme, Beyond Agile, couldn’t have been more fitting. We’ve all seen Agile in action - daily standups, retrospectives, velocity tracking - but I wanted to dig deeper. What happens when the playbook ends? What do high-performing teams really do when they don’t just follow Agile - they live it?
This blog post reflects that experience. If you couldn’t attend, consider this your backstage pass—not just to the session itself but also to the lessons and energy it carried.
Setting the Stage
We began with something simple: a shift in mindset. I opened the session by asking, “How many of you feel your teams truly experiment?” Most hands hesitated. It was clear - despite our rituals, many teams struggle to create space for learning through real experimentation.
To warm up, we tackled the Fixed vs. Experimenter Mindset. Using sticky notes, participants wrote down phrases they’ve heard (or said) that block experimentation:
“We need all the data before we start.”
“Failure is not an option.”
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Then we flipped them. Each group rewrote these blockers with a growth lens:
“We don’t need all the data - just a good enough starting point.”
“Failure is feedback.”
“Let’s test something new and learn.”
This wall-to-wall exchange created a visible shift in energy. The room transformed from hesitant to hopeful, grounded in the idea that mindset is where experimentation begins.
Designing Real Experiments, Solving Real Problems
This was a group activity run across five tables, each with 3 to 7 participants, working collaboratively in pods.
The heart of the session came next: Design Your Own Experiment. I handed each pod a simple canvas with six prompts - hypothesis, smallest testable step, success metrics, risks, and next steps. No frameworks, no acronyms. Just clarity and curiosity.
What emerged was powerful:
A team tackled improving daily Scrum calls by experimenting with rotating facilitators.
Another worked on marketing brand visibility by testing a 5-day social media content burst.
A third looked at finance team morale, planning a safe-to-fail “Fun Friday” pilot.
These weren’t hypothetical. They were real challenges brought in from the participants' day-to-day. They left the workshop not just with inspiration, but with experiments ready to run next week.
As they shared their ideas and received peer feedback ("How could you make that test even smaller?"), Something became clear: the ability to experiment isn’t a tool - it’s a culture. A way of thinking, trying, and learning.
Personal Action Plans: Turning Ideas into Intentions
To ground the session in accountability and momentum, we closed with one final, personal activity: the Personal Action Plan. Each participant reflected on their workshop experience and wrote down one experiment they committed to try in their context.
But we didn’t stop there!
Everyone was encouraged to find a partner in the room and share their planned experiment. These pairs committed to checking in with each other after a week or two, creating a ripple of continued learning and accountability well beyond the 50-minute session.
It was one of the most powerful moments of the day - watching individuals turn intention into action, supported by a simple human promise: “I’ll check back in with you.”
Why This Matters – and What I Learned
This workshop was personal. It was my way of saying: Agile is not the endgame. It’s the launchpad.
I’m grateful to the TriAgile organizers for creating a truly energizing space where these ideas could flourish - and for a speaker dinner that felt more like a gathering of old friends than a formality.
To my team at Equip Health - your behind-the-scenes support, merchandise, materials, and belief in this idea made the workshop what it was. What’s more, I realized that Equip is already living many Agile 2 principles without even labeling them that way. We are adaptive. We iterate. We lead with curiosity.
Special thanks to Cliff Berg, whose keynote on Agile 2 laid the perfect foundation. His thoughtful notes before my session helped boost my confidence, and getting a signed copy of his book Agile 2 was the cherry on top.
For Those Who Couldn’t Attend…
If you missed the workshop, here’s how you can recreate it with your team:
Start with a mindset wall. Let teams surface language that blocks learning, and reframe it.
Use a simple Experiment Canvas. Focus on hypothesis, test, success metrics, and risks.
Keep it real. Let teams pick genuine challenges and work on them in small, safe ways.
Close with a personal commitment. Have each person write one experiment they’ll try this week, and pair them up to check in later.
You don’t need a stage to build a culture of experimentation. You just need space, safety, and support.
Final Thoughts
In a world obsessed with delivery and speed, experimentation is a quiet rebellion - an act of humility and courage.
Let’s keep encouraging our teams not just to do Agile, but to learn loudly, test bravely, and adapt constantly.
Real agility isn’t about knowing the answers. It’s about being ready to find them.
The mindset shift exercise is particularly clever - having participants identify blockers and then reframe them as opportunities. This type of activity can be powerful for engineering teams who may get stuck in established patterns or processes.