Field Craft
The ways a dashboard lies
A working set of methodology pieces on how people-analytics data misleads — and how to read it honestly. Each takes one trap that turns a confident chart into a wrong decision, names it, and shows the discipline that defuses it. No products required: this is the craft, free to use.
Read them as a set — they're the recurring ways the same mistake shows up — or grab the one that matches the chart in front of you.
- 01
Methodology · causal inference
Correlation Isn't a Driver
The "top drivers of engagement" slide is a correlation wearing a causal word. A driver is a claim about what happens when you change something — and you can't get that from a regression on survey data, however good the chart looks.
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- 02
Methodology · benchmarking
The Benchmark Trap
A raw benchmark compares you to a population that differs on everything, then hands you the gap as if it were about the one thing you care about. The percentile is mostly a measurement of who you stood next to.
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- 03
Methodology · small-sample inference · draft
The Law of Small Numbers
A team of seven swings on a single response, and the dashboard paints the wobble red and hands it to a manager as a verdict. The smallest cells make the most dramatic charts and carry the least information.
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- 04
Methodology · survivorship & selection
What the Exit Data Can't See
Exit surveys are a damage map of the planes that came back. The intelligence you need — the people still at their desks, quietly looking — is exactly what they structurally can't contain.
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- 05
Methodology · multiple comparisons
Significance on Demand
Slice an engagement survey enough ways and something always crosses p < .05. That's not a discovery — it's arithmetic. The threshold was built for one test, not five hundred.
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- 06
Methodology · base rates & prediction
The Base Rate Problem
A hiring test can be 85% accurate and wrong about most of the people it flags. Accuracy is a property of the test; usefulness is a property of the test and how rare the thing it's hunting actually is.
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These also live in the main magazinefeed — they're about the field, not the firm. For how we think about building products, see the Principles.