About this episode
$37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes.
Three executives lost their jobs this month for making the same mistake. They presented data showing success after their initiatives were launched. Boards approved promotions. Then someone asked the one question nobody thought to ask: “Could something else explain this?” The sales spike coincided with a competitor going bankrupt. The satisfaction increase happened when a toxic manager quit. The correlation was real. The causation was fiction. This mistake derailed their careers.
But here's the good news: once you see how this works, you'll never unsee it. And you'll become the person in the room who spots these errors before they cost millions.
But first, you need to understand what makes this mistake so common—and why even smart people fall for it every single day.
What is Causal Thinking?
At its core, causal thinking is the practice of identifying genuine cause-and-effect relationships rather than settling for surface-level associations. It's asking not just “do these things happen together?” but “does one actually cause the other?”
This skill means you look beyond patterns and correlations to understand what's actually producing the outcomes you're seeing. When you think causally, you can spot the difference between coincidence, correlation, and true causation—a distinction that separates effective decision-makers from those who waste millions on solutions that were never going to work.
Loss of Causal Thinking Skills
Across every domain of professional life, this confusion costs fortunes and derails careers.
A SaaS company sees customer churn decrease after implementing new onboarding emails—and immediately scales it company-wide. What the
