Pilots are crucial. You test out your vision and watch it come to life, but not without trial and error. Those pilots often fail, but not for reasons you might think. Here’s another way to look at it.

You’ve built something real; now here’s how you keep it.

Most pilots don’t fail because the results were bad.

They fail because no one can tell whether the results mean anything.

That’s the core problem Kenneth Phua, Global Digital Business Transformation and Growth Leader, described in a recent conversation with Tessa Burg on the Leader Generation podcast—and it’s one of the cleanest articulations of a real problem that I see across client work all the time.

So here’s what tends to happen.

A team sets out to test 10 things. Then, barriers like stakeholder pressure and time constraints trim that list to eight, then six, then five. By the time the pilot wraps up, you’re evaluating it against criteria that no longer reflect what the full program needs to do. The pilot “passes,” but the data can’t support a decision to scale because the signal isn’t there.

Some advice from someone who has seen this happen before.

First: an MVP is not an excuse for an incomplete product. Kenneth Phua’s framing is direct: if you removed a success metric from scope, you have to own that gap—and you have to validate it before you commit to scaling.

Second: scaling once and scaling repeatedly are very different. Most organizations count a rollout as success. Kenneth asks whether any team, in any market, could replicate that experience consistently—with the same tools, the same training, the same intent. That’s a different question entirely. And it’s usually the one no one is asking until things fall apart downstream.

Third: manual processes are undervalued in pilots. Not every component needs to be automated before you can validate whether a proposition works. A well-run manual process behind a polished front end tells you what you need to know without the infrastructure cost. It’s not a shortcut. It’s a smarter use of limited time and budget.

Fourth: a one-sentence directive is not a timeline. Tessa brought her own sharp observation to the conversation: just because a leader says something in one sentence doesn’t mean it takes one week to accomplish. “We’ll just roll it out” is not a timeline. The translation from executive intention to frontline adoption is real work—and it’s the work that most rollout plans underestimate by an order of magnitude.

If you’re scoping a pilot, running one, or trying to figure out why your last one didn’t lead anywhere, this conversation gives you a clear framework to pressure-test your assumptions. It’s available wherever you listen to podcasts under Leader Generation, Episode 172 or click the link below.

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-q3kfc-1ae5657