The Calibration Case Method - Commoncog

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The Calibration Case Method

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A 13 minute introduction to the Calibration Case Method<br>Commoncog’s approach to business learning relies on a very specific approach to business cases. We call it the Calibration Case Method , to differentiate it from the ‘Case Method’ popularised by Harvard Business School.<br>What are calibration cases, how do they work, and why are they superior? We’ll link to sources at the bottom.

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What are Calibration Cases?<br>Calibration cases are business narratives that teach you to see. A calibration case is simple: it is merely a narrative of a specific business situation. What makes calibration cases special is how they are meant to be consumed: they are organised in sequence according to concept, so you are able to do rapid case comparisons across the same concept. This exercise helps you calibrate your expectations of the business concept in question.<br>This method of consuming cases simulates what experts in business and investing do when they’re learning a business concept or examining a business scenario. For instance, have you ever wondered how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger study business, given that they spend so much time reading about businesses? The Calibration Case Method describes what they’re actually doing in their heads.<br>How Should You Use Calibration Cases?<br>Here is how you should use calibration cases: for each business concept or framework that you want to understand, you should search for, read and revisit between 10-20 cases in order to calibrate your understanding of the concept or framework in practice .<br>As you are reading, you should compare between the cases you’ve seen before. Ask yourself:<br>What are some surprising similarities between this case and that other case?<br>What are some surprising dissimilarities between this case and that other case?<br>With time, you will learn to notice new patterns of your own, and will intuitively begin to collect cases from your own experiences, in the wild.<br>How do you know you’re improving?<br>The specific thing that calibration cases accomplish is that they help speed up your pattern recognition . This acts as an input into your decision making.<br>What does this mean?<br>One thing that skilled practitioners can do easily that novices cannot is that skilled folks can see things that novices are blind to. In expertise research, the technical term for this is that ‘experts can make perceptual discriminations that novices miss.’<br>Calibration cases are designed to help you gain those same ‘perceptual discriminations’. When you read a lot of cases on the same concept, your brain will automatically pick up on cues that change between each case. You will notice that you are able to notice more details over time.<br>This is how you know you’re improving: when you can see things that your past self would have missed.<br>Incidentally, this is why calibration cases are said to be a type of ‘expertise acceleration’. Without the Calibration Case Method, you would have to gain such pattern recognition by having these business experiences in real life. Because cases are far faster to consume compared to real-life experiences, we can speed up your journey to expert-level much faster than if you were to collect these experiences or cases by yourself.<br>Why Calibration Cases Are So Effective<br>Let’s take a step back. Why is it so difficult to learn in business and investing?<br>The short answer is that business and investing are ‘ill-structured domains’. An ill-structured domain is a domain where concepts exist, but the way these concepts show up in the real world are always unique and endlessly varied . Perhaps you may have noticed this: every business situation you encounter is slightly novel. It may not be completely different, but something is always new.<br>The real problem with learning in ill-structured domains is this endless novelty. Medicine is a good example of an ill-structured domain. When expertise researchers studied novice doctors and compared them to expert doctors, they found that:<br>Novice doctors were not able to go from the symptoms of a real patient to the mechanism of a concept (like ‘heart attack’) that they’ve learnt in medical school.<br>Why? Well, new doctors are not able to handle the novelty of very different case presentations. For example, heart attacks can look very different based on the age, race, gender, and medical history of the patient. Some heart attacks are quick, and may cause death quickly. Other heart attacks can start out looking like indigestion for a few days. Some slow-moving heart attacks can last more than a week, and have no symptoms other than a gently worsening shortness of breath. Very experienced doctors know all these things...