Hypothesis-First Thinking Can Save Your Business
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In 2015, Facebook released information showing that its users were far more engaged with video content than any other kind of media. This sent ripples through the entire media ecosystem. Suddenly every company was talking about "pivot to video." Companies like Vice and Buzzfeed laid off writers and started producing more videos. The problem? The Facebook data wasn't real. Facebook shared inflated data and avoided owning up to it for several years. I have some sympathy for the companies that blindly followed Facebook's advice. However, they should have treated it like a hypothesis, not gospel. They should have asked the question: Can we improve our businesses by shifting to more video content? And then tested it. I teach people how to do this in the third module of Think Like A Strategy Consultant around a real-world case (randomly about Facebook too). So, before you follow the latest trend, get excited about that buzzword, or implement the latest strategy the "cool" company just announced, maybe test it first? |
Paul Millerd
Freelancer, creator & writer
In my workshops, I often use this slide: I'll then ask people to drop in the chat: "What percentile do you think 'high-performance' stands for if 100% is best? Answers flow in: 85% 95% 70% 60% 88% 99% It's almost always like this. I do something like this to show people that while we often have an exact number, it rarely matches what people are thinking or perceiving. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the illusion of transparency. If you can get more specific and exact, you will...
The latest version of Claude can create PowerPoint slides. So I gave it a challenge. Turn this "bad example" I use in my workshops into a good slide based on the principles I share on strategyU.co I gave it this simple prompt that took me no longer than ten seconds to write: Take this slide and take the lessons on slide design on strategyu.co and turn this into a compelling slide, improve the fonts, get to one single insight, match the title and content, and have the title be a clear takeaway...
I started StrategyU to teach knowledge workers the tools, frameworks, mindsets, and approaches that I learned in strategy consulting. When I started this, I thought that my audience would be people in big companies stuck inside strategy, finance, or analytics groups that didn’t have access to training. This was one of the segments that have found value in my work but a second segment that surprised me has been small and medium-sized consulting firms ranging from 5 people to 200. Over the last...