“Where Are the Grown-Ups?”
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/
Contents
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]
Links to JP’s Work
- Substack: Strategy in Praxis https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com/
- WWW: JP Castlin https://jpcastlin.com/
- Twitter: @JPCastlin https://twitter.com/JPCastlin
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpcastlin/
- MarketingWeek: https://www.marketingweek.com/author/jp-castlin/
Articles
- Laplace & Demons - Strategy in Praxis | (substack.com)
- Bets & Blockbusters - Strategy in Praxis | (substack.com)
- Marc Pritchard knows better than to believe P&G can act like a startup | (marketingweek.com)
- Where are the grown-ups? | LinkedIn
