By Doug Garnett & JP Castlin, July 2025 In the May 23rd edition of JP Castlin’s Strategy in Praxis newsletter we suggested businesses often face a type of uncertainty JP named “dynamic uncertainty” — a unique uncertainty revealed when we understand the inherent complexity of doing business. Dynamic uncertainty, though, is missing from the canon of uncertainty classifications. In that article we noted: …dynamic uncertainty keeps changing. Experiments lessen uncertainty in the moment ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist. Kenneth Boulding To an extraordinary degree, our view of business … has been shaped by publicly owned companies, which actually make up a small percentage of the entire business population, and by fast-growing technology ventures, which is an even smaller group. Bo Burlingame Powerful mythologies demand growth in business. These mythologies arrive from the truth that ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
Last week, Americans watched a heavyweight slap battle between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. While few were surprised to see Musk and Trump part ways, the divorce became more entertaining with memes like one suggesting the Ukraine mediate their conflict and ensure Trump thank Elon for his donations. The DOGE Assumption of Easy Wins Behind this split lies the truth that there are no easy wins for eliminating unnecessary spending in bureaucracy. Except, DOGE workers thought it would be easy as we...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
The following is based on several weeks of conversation with JP Castlin which explored issues of experimentation — discussion which led to a first and second joint article in the Strategy in Praxis newsletter and one I authored about emergent goals for experimentation. (Some Strategy in Praxis content is reserved for subscribers.) The following is derived from these discussions though the opinions expressed here are my own. So while JP deserves credit for contributing to what is useful and ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
My most recent posts pursued ideas of human self-organization and the potential value it offers as we do business. This led me to recall an article I wrote for JP Castlin’s excellent newsletter Strategy & Praxis nearly two years ago (link provided). There is a generally available portion and more discussion for those who are paid subscribers to the newsletter. The post starts with a favorite quotes about the difficulty of organization from Vannevar Bush — a brilliant technical executive w...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
In last week’s post I introduced the idea that self-organization is a powerful force in both the natural and the human worlds. I also introduced readers to the technocratic myth — that the wisest in the ways of science will be able to engineer businesses and societies to inevitable success. Critically, technocratic ideas cannot succeed because they are based on an out-of-date view of science — they rely on a traditional scientific paradigm which complexity science has shown invalid. To...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
One surprising discovery from complexity science has been that both natural and human worlds “self-organize” in highly effective ways. This truth has been studied extensively in the apparently chaotic flight of starlings in a mumuration or flock. Scientists have concluded each individual bird is an independent agent making choices according to generally shared rules while both constrained by, and enabled by, the movements and choices of the birds around them. My own reading indicates the ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
About a year ago I wrote about ontologies in psychology and how the unacknowledged assumptions of “substance ontology” had led late 20th century work to its failure to comprehend individuals. A friend of mine, a practicing psychologist who had started a local university psychology program, had alerted me to the problem as he was frustrated by the failure of academic work to be of any value when treating individual human beings. I recommend investigating the process approaches which are de...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
Having looked deeply into differentiation and distinction in Part I and Part II of this series let’s turn to the research and discussions which started the great battle between the two. That leads us to the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science (EBI) and Professor Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow. The entire team at EBI are an outstanding resource for marketers and often the best source for good research work on marketing issues and Sharp’s book is an outstanding ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
Just over a week ago we looked at how the practices of Differentiation and Distinction are fundamentally different with respect to time. We saw, in this analysis, that differences in a product may matter to a consumer for only a very short time then leave behind a conclusion to prefer a product. By contrast, distinctiveness matters for a brand and must be stable and continual through time in order to be effective. Continuing to explore the complex nature of these qualities, in today’s post ...| Doug Garnett’s Blog
Thoughts on marketing, advertising, media, DRTV and technology.| Doug Garnett’s Blog
In the May 23rd edition of JP Castlin’s Strategy in Praxis newsletter we suggested businesses often face a type of uncertainty JP named "dynamic uncertainty"| Doug Garnett’s Blog