“Where Are the Grown-Ups?”

02-11-2021 • 1 hr 15 mins

JP Castlin on Complexity, what it means for your business, and how to deal with it via safe-to-fail experimentation.

Originally planned to be Episode 1 of Season 1 (as per audio), becomes S02e02 because we now have 2 full intro episodes and can't have Episode 0 or Season Zero on the podcast platforms.

Next week, we'll talk about Experimental Economics—but in this episode, JP Castlin talks to us about complexity, how understanding complexity is relevant for running a business, and how it all relates to experimentation.

About Business Games: www.business-games.ai/about/

Add ~1 min to the timestamps after 11th minute mark.

Introduction [00:00]
On Complexity: A Primer [03:55]
On Systems: In Nature and Organizations—Ordered Clear, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic [04:38]
A Marketing Example of a Dispositional System [06:14]
…and a Chaotic System [06:53]
On Experimenting in Different Kinds of Systems [07:09]
On Two Types of Uncertainty: Epistemic (Knowledge-based) and Aleatory (Inherent and Irreducible) [08:11]
On Contexts and More on Quantum Mechanics Vs Newtonian Physics [12:02]
On How to Deal with Uncertainty in Complexity [13:49]
Fail-safe Vs Safe-to-fail: Marvel Vs Blumhouse [15:15]
Experimentation in Various Contexts [19:13]
Online Vs Offline, and Operational Efficiency Vs Strategic Choice [20:28]
On Eternal Boiling, Premature Convergence, A/B Testing, and Local Optima [23:46]
System Has Its Own Behaviour: Ants and Colonies [26:52]
Strategy and (Equi-) Probability [27:53]
On Not Getting Disheartened [30:58]
On Boundary Conditions, Company-specific Metrics, Scaling and Dampening [31:57]
On Corporate Versus SME, Small Versus Big [34:28]
On Product Versus Service [36:40]
On Services, Complexity, Causality, and Defensive Decision-making [39:24]
On the Value of Consultants in Complexity [46:12]
On Cost-out Versus Value-add, Start-ups and Scaling [49:36]
On Start-ups and Proprietary Data [51:09]
On Deliberate Versus Emergent Strategy [52:54]
(More) on How to Deal with Complex Problems in Practice [55:02]
The Homework [57:39]
JP’s Own Work as It Relates to Experiments, Strategy, and Complexity [01:00:17]
On the Key Takeaways: Both Jokingly and Seriously [01:07:18]
On Emotions in Experimentation [01:10:24]