The (penultimate) one on experimentation
A new hypothesis
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q3-25Q4
The 2025 lineup:
What to do when you don’t know what to do.
How to create a sustainable competitive advantage through superior adaptability. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Succeed big, fail small.
How to use experimentation to drive efficiency and effectiveness of innovation at scale.
Managing uncertainty.
How to steer an organization through a sea of change.
Retail 3.0.
How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2026 follow-up to the 2022 smash hit white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
The TL;DR
The popular understanding of uncertainty as either aleatoric or epistemic (sometimes referred to in economic doctrine as risk and uncertainty, respectively) is insufficient to describe uncertainty in complex adaptive systems. However, declaring radical uncertainty to be “all else” is unsatisfactory.
Experiments highlight the issue, but also point us towards the answer.
The implications for how firms ought to manage uncertainty are profound.
Personal updates before we go-go
A (thankfully) calmer week, at least health-wise, since last we spoke. The appendicitis appears to have decided to chill out for the time being, though our shaky relationship is clearly not yet over; I am still feeling the occasional pain in my side. At least it is much less than it once was.
After what will be 45 years on this planet this fall, I finally decided to get reading glasses. My eyesight has always been perfect, but fine print without sufficient light has become a challenge.
A welcomed second order effect of wearing glasses while I hack away at my laptop is that it has become significantly easier to work long hours. Makes sense, I suppose. Less energy spent trying to turn minute hieroglyphs into readable letters means more energy for thinking.
My wife says that my glasses make me look “intelligent”, which goes to prove that you can be middle-aged and still experience things for the first time.
No financial market analysis this week, as my schedule simply has not allowed it (and today’s piece constitutes a completely new hypothesis, which has required a fair bit of thinking). Normal services will be resumed next week. I promise.
Moving on.