Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that the word causal came from the word because. Because there’s a cause contained in the word because. The word is almost like a commandment. Be the cause. I don’t think that’s really true. It’s just a silly association. The word because seems to be an element of a persuasive argument. How about a little thought experiment? Consider the assessment: “Peaches are gross.” Okay, you may have one or many positions on this controversial subject: You agree because your experience matches that statement, you disagree because your experience does not match that statement, you may not agree nor disagree because it’s possible that some peaches are gross and some other peaches are[…]

Roger Martin observed in The Opposable Mind that our stances inform our tools, and our tools inform our experiences. For those who take a stance of continuous improvement and risk management, choosing simulation as a tool is a good course of action. This post unpacks that statement. Stance What are you? You decide your stance. Are you a scientist? Are you an artist? Are you a software engineer? An entrepreneur? You get to decide. Tools Your stance has a powerful impact on which tools you pick up. A scientist picks up the scientific method. An artist may pick up a paint brush. A software engineer pick up python. An entrepreneur may choose the lean canvas and the pitch deck. Experiences[…]

My contemporaneous notes from a particular INFORMS Marketing Science Conference six years ago feature the letters W, T, and F scrawled in the margins a few times. I learned of a deeper problem lurking in the way we were using the crosstab to identify segmentation. In this post, I’ll unpack a heap of jargon and lay the concern bare. To the twenty or so marketing scientists in the room at the time, I read concern on the faces of about a dozen. It was a atypical because typically that community doesn’t get concerned about too much. One leader remarked that most in industry were not even executing basic segmentation on their users, so it wasn’t a huge industrial concern, but[…]