In July last year Commoncog case writer Rhea Purohit and I ran a course titled Speedrunning the Idea Maze. It was a bit of an experiment: how would a course built around the Calibration Case Method work? Would we be able to change the way people think about finding product market fit? Could we change their perceptions of uncertainty and risk? Could we make them act differently?
“This course basically teaches you to be an entrepreneur,” said a course participant to me, after we wrapped things up. I wasn’t 100% satisfied with what we did, though this made me pleased. In truth, we didn’t know that this would be the primary takeaway when we started the course. We didn’t know many things when we started the course — which is sweetly ironic; doing better with uncertainty was one of our learning goals.
Also, in the same way that what you learn changes you, what you teach also changes you. Teaching the course changed me — it made me reexamine my relationship with uncertainty. I hope to explain why.
On the eve of the second cohort of StIM, I want to catalog a few things we’ve learnt from the first iteration of the course. We’d listed most of these lessons internally; I’ve posted some of my rough thoughts in Commoncog’s members-only forum. Now that I’m writing this publicly, though, I’ll link some of our teaching methods to the accelerated expertise research we’ve covered on Commoncog. It is for that reason that even if you aren’t interested in taking StIM, I hope you’ll find this account useful.
Many of these lessons are, in-retrospect, highly obvious things, though not things that we thought about before the course launched. Ironically, many of these lessons were illustrations of the concepts we taught in the case itself.
You’ll see why in a minute.
First, a quick recap. In order to make sense of what I’m about to say, it’s important to understand the premise of Speedrunning the Idea Maze. In a sentence: over the course of four weeks, we walk you through ten cases of successful product market fit, so that you have synthetic memories you can draw on in your own exploration of the idea maze. This was the first course we’ve done using the Calibration Case Method.
The cognitive science behind the case method is covered in detail here, and can get quite deep. But the motivating idea was simple. I had noticed, over years of collecting and publishing business cases, that mainstream narratives of product market fit (PMF) simply did not make sense. In 2024 I wrote an essay titled The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea, which became somewhat popular. In it, I pointed out that every story of successful PMF is idiosyncratic. Idiosyncratic is a big word with a simple meaning: it means ‘unique’. It can also mean ‘peculiar’, or ‘individual’. If you took this observation seriously, I argued, then you should conclude there is no way to systematically find PMF.
For many, this was a bitter pill to swallow. I was arguing that beliefs like “use this framework but it will only work some of the time” or “use this framework because it makes sense logically” are all laughably useless. (If something works only some of the time, isn’t that … superstition?) In my essay I argued “don’t bother with PMF frameworks during your search, because all frameworks for PMF are useless ex-ante.” I have found no examples that contradict this belief: while certain frameworks can tell you that you’ve found PMF after you’ve found it, and some frameworks can tell you what the shape of PMF looks like, and still other frameworks can prevent you from lying to yourself, no PMF framework can tell you how to find PMF before you’ve found it.
But does this then mean that all is useless? That there is no hope for the entrepreneur but to get lucky?
Well no, not quite. It is true that luck is required to find a business that works. (One of the themes in the course is to hammer this home. Students quickly learn that even when the actors involved were highly skilled, there was still a huge amount of luck involved in finding PMF). But as I have argued in the second half of The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea, there is a way to operationalise getting lucky.
That method is Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectuation.
It should be no surprise to learn that the big concept in StIM was Effectuation. However, in the first cohort, we only introduced it at the end of week two (this was out of a total of four weeks). Introducing our primary concept so late made for an interesting experience.
We had asked students to find surprising similarities and surprising dissimilarities within the cases we presented. According to Cognitive Flexibility Theory — which is the theory that underpins the Calibration Case Method — such case comparisons are necessary for the creation of expertise. In the first half of the course students had difficulty doing this. Without a conceptual lens, it was difficult to come up with good comparisons. It was only when we formally introduced Effectuation that students found it easier to do comparisons across all the cases.
As a result, one of the biggest things we learnt in Cohort One was that the timing of concepts was hugely important. At which point should we have introduced Effectuation? This was only one of the considerations. We had other concepts we wanted to introduce, and they, too, needed to be timed properly.
Another thing that we noticed was that one’s experience of a case depends on a quirk of human cognition: the introduction of a new framework or concept literally changes how you experience a case. Introducing new concepts later would cause students to reinterpret cases that were introduced earlier in the course. (It also caused them to reinterpret the behaviour of entrepreneurs they were exposed to in their lives; one participant told me it changed the way he saw his mother, who had run the family business for many years).
It was my suspicion that the act of reinterpretation is more powerful as a learning mechanism. This quirk of cognition is something that we’re going to use more deliberately in Cohort Two.
Finally, I should note that Effectuation by itself is a very powerful idea. The bigger challenge we had was to help students change their thinking in order to become more effectual. I don’t think we did this very well, but I’ll talk about how we attempted to do this in a bit.
This was a more tactical thing. Originally, we’d planned for eight of the ten cases to be presented live, in class. Students almost universally disliked this arrangement. It left too little time for group sensemaking. We immediately shifted gears: we presented one case as video in Session 2, and then presented both cases as video in Sessions Three and Four.
In Cohort Two, we’re presenting all the cases as video. This led to two ideas:
Which leads us to the next topic.
I mentioned earlier that Effectuation is the only logical approach to the crapshoot that is the Idea Maze. What is meant by Effectuation, and how do you operationalise it?
The basic ideas of Effectuation are very simple and we have discussed them on Commoncog before. The idea is that every successful serial entrepreneur thinks the same way.
In the early 2000s, with the help of her PhD supervisor (and academic legend) Herbert Simon, Saras Sarasvathy took a bunch of experienced entrepreneurs and gave them a thinking-aloud task. Their task was to start a new company, presented as 10 problems frequently encountered by entrepreneurs during the earliest, most uncertain days of a new venture. She recorded their thinking as they worked through the task. She then administered the same task to a group of novices: a bunch of MBA students.
A quick note about these entrepreneurs: these were not average founders. All of the entrepreneurs that Sarasvathy selected had started more than one company, had taken at least one company public, and in the company that they took public, had spent least ten years with that company. Amongst the 27 entrepreneurs that Sarasvathy interviewed, the average number of new companies started was seven, and the minimum number of companies started was three. Few founders can boast such a track record.
Sarasvathy found that all of these entrepreneurs thought in the exact same way.
Here is how they thought: all good entrepreneurs start out from 1) who they are, 2) what they know, 3) whom they know and 4) what they have, and effectuate forwards into the unknown, in search of some customer demand they can serve … in a configuration that is acceptable to them.
As they do so, they follow the following three principles:
Effectuation is a very simple idea, but deceptively so. One can go arbitrarily deep with the idea. I won’t go into further detail, because we teach many of these ideas in the course and I don’t want to give everything away. But I’ll give you a taste. If you invert the list of principles above, you’ll get a list of common mistakes that entrepreneurial novices make:
In simple terms, Effectuation is an adaptation that every successful serial entrepreneur makes in response to the uncertainty of the idea maze. Finding product market fit is — to some degree — a matter of luck. So what do experienced entrepreneurs do when they cannot guarantee that they will get lucky? The answer: they structure their business and their lives such that they can make effectively infinite affordable loss bets, collecting or creating many partners along the way to limit their losses, with a bias to action and an open stance, so that they may capitalise on whatever they find along the way.
Effectuation is a strategy that allows you to survive — maybe even thrive — on the uncertainty of life.
Now the question is: how do we get students to internalise this?
Ask a typical person how to teach a concept like Effectuation, and they will default to the method of learning that they experienced in school.
What is that method? That method is to teach you the content of the concept. A dumb, if obvious way to teach this is to present the framework, perhaps with a PowerPoint presentation, perhaps with an exam at the end. As a result, most students would be able to regurgitate the concept of Effectuation but would not be able to apply it to their lives.
Did we do this? Of course not. This is Commoncog. We’re not interested in textbook teaching. We’re interested in what works.
In my summary of Accelerated Expertise, I described two theories of accelerated expertise used by the US Military: Cognitive Flexibility Theory, which underpins the case method we’ve developed at Commoncog, and Cognitive Transformation Theory, which I’ve not talked about as much but is no less important.
CTT was developed in response to what I’ve just described above: the way most people approach learning is with a ‘storehouse metaphor’ — that is, ideas and concepts are transmitted from teacher to student and are then ‘stored’ in the student’s head, like filling a bucket with water.
The researchers who came up with CTT, Gary Klein and Holly Baxter, point out that there is actually another way of thinking about developing expertise: you create training that is designed to teach students to see. In this approach to learning, the goal is not to add new knowledge to the student’s head, but instead to change what they currently notice about reality. The fancy way of putting this is that we ‘want to help students make the same perceptual discriminations that experts do.’ This approach is more powerful in messier domains like warfighting or medicine (or business), because the act of reflection helps students learn from their own experiences when they are doing trial and error cycles in the real world.
(This somewhat of a subtle argument, especially if you’re not used to pedagogy. Perhaps I should dive deeper in a separate essay. Read my past coverage of CTT here.)
Anyway, setting theory aside, what does this mean for us? In Cohort One of StIM, we gave students scaffolds to make sense of each case, and then we got them to discuss what they’d noticed when comparing between cases in a group setting. Our hope was that the act of sensemaking would follow them into the real world, when they start businesses or operate uncertain new bets within their own careers. Later in the course, we asked them to apply this lens to their own lives.
Some students got this. They were often those who were already engaged in entrepreneurial activity, and were looking for better language to describe what they were instinctively doing. Others struggled.
So: we can do a lot more. In the upcoming cohort of StIM, we want students to be able to spot effectual thinking in the wild. You see, every time you are presented with an uncertain new proposition like “let’s start a business that sells noodles in Phuket” or “let’s open a new branch of our company in Russia” there is a way to approach the problem effectually (that is: like an entrepreneur) and causally (that is: like an MBA student).
If we teach students to recognise when they’re doing one type of thinking vs the other, perhaps they will able to self-steer their thinking?
We have a few more ideas like this. The goal, as always, is to teach students to see. But we’d rather not say what those ideas are. Let’s keep it as a surprise, for course participants who have paid up.
Cohort Two of Speedrunning the Idea Maze is available for sale until Friday, 16th January 2026. As I write this, there are 30 seats left. We’re not sure when we’ll run this course again. You may buy it here.