In: Experiments, Doing

This is fantastic (Financial Times):

What’s so strange to an economist who walks into a business is that economists have a set of models that describe how businesses should optimally respond. But that’s not how businesses make decisions.

That’s not to say the economists’ models are necessarily right. The business model can be sensible. It’s usually pretty seat-of-the-pants, built round a set of rules of thumb, but that makes sense because the world is so complex and they have to make so many decisions that they can’t optimise every one. But there are some decisions that are too important to make guesses on – and, in those cases, you either need to find data to help you or to generate your own data through experiments.

This is better; always in favor of “doing;” experimenting in business/+health care:

If you can figure out the answer without having to design and conduct an experiment, that’s wonderful. But a lot of everyday activities that businesses undertake could be transformed into experiments with almost no effort and almost no cost. The way businesses operate more and more lends itself to being able to run these real-world experiments. The lessons are enormous and the costs are often trivial.