The Calibration Case Method

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.

What are calibration cases, how do they work, and why are they superior? We’ll link to scientific sources at the bottom.

What are Calibration Cases?

Calibration cases are business narratives that teach you to see. A calibration case is simple: it is just 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.

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.

How Should You Use Calibration Cases?

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.

As you are reading, you should compare between the cases you’ve seen before. Ask yourself:

• What are some surprising similarities between this case and that other case?
• What are some surprising dissimilarities between this case and that other case?

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.

How do you know you’re improving?

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.

What does this mean?

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.’

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.

This is how you know you’re improving: when you can see things that your past self would have missed.

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.

Why Calibration Cases Are So Effective

Let’s take a step back. Why is it so difficult to learn in business and investing?

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.

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:

• 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.
• 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 and are well calibrated in their expectations. They are more able to give an accurate diagnosis. But how do you train novice doctors to do the same, quickly, when symptoms are always somewhat novel on a case-by-case basis?

The short answer is to calibrate them in the classroom, by showing them many real world cases of heart attacks. That way, these novice doctors know what to expect when looking for a heart attack.

This is the same challenge when it comes to business and investing:

• In investing, the way ‘intrinsic value’ shows up is always unique to the specifics of that particular business. The more cases you see, the better you become at evaluating value.
• For business operators, turnarounds (as an example) are always unique to the specifics of the business in question. Great turnaround CEOs don’t have set playbooks, but they know what to do because they’ve seen so many successful — and unsuccessful — cases that they know what to expect.

In other words it is not enough to learn business or investing frameworks. These same researchers tell us that experts in these ‘ill-structured’ domains do two things that novices do not:

1. They actively build up a large set of cases in their heads. When looking at a new, real world case, experts do rapid comparison with fragments of cases that they’ve seen before in order to generate a diagnosis (“This is another one of those ...”). They may communicate their reasoning in terms of principles and frameworks, but the initial mechanism in their heads is always rapid case comparison.
2. They have an ‘adaptive worldview’: they believe that nothing is simple, everything in their domain is the result of complex interactions between many forces, and that most things are the result of multiple causes. As a result, they a) do not look for simple, monocausal explanations, because they know none might exist, and b) they intuitively collect new cases throughout their entire lives, because they know there will always be something new and unique they’ve never seen before. Put differently, experts in such domains prize cases over frameworks, because they know case comparison is more effective in the face of the ever-changing complexity of their domain.

As a result, expertise researchers have found that the quickest way to aid novices is to expose them to 10-20 real world cases for each concept. This is the basis for the Calibration Case Method.

The researchers also recommend the following things:

1. Learners should be taught that the domain they are in “is not simple”, and to expect a certain amount of novelty and uniqueness due to the complex interplay of many forces.
2. The first, second and third cases that learners are exposed to should be very different from each other, so that learners are quickly calibrated to understand that “wow, the way this idea shows up in the real world can look very different!” This prevents them from holding on too tightly to any single instantiation, the same way that a novice doctor might be attached to the notion that a heart attack only looks like ‘patient clutches arm and falls over in pain.’
3. When reading each case, learners should always ask two questions:
   1. What are some surprising similarities to other cases I’ve seen before?
   2. What are some surprising dissimilarities to other cases I’ve seen before?
4. Learners should make notes on the answers to these two questions. In their research, the researchers note that while novices tend to only ask the first question, experts make sure to also ask the second question.

These four recommendations are how you should consume calibration cases on Commoncog.

Why are Calibration Cases Superior?

The traditional ‘case method’, as invented by Harvard Business School, may be used as calibration cases. But that is not their primary goal.

The primary way HBS case studies are used are as inputs to a class discussion. The central conceit of the case method is that the case will describe a specific business situation or challenge, and then students are expected to discuss what to do in that situation. This in-class discussion is guided by a professor, often with an industry expert present.

There have been many criticisms of the case method over the decades. The biggest problem is that there is no good feedback on decisions ‘made’ during the class discussion. There is no way to tell if specific analyses or recommendations are the ‘right’ ones — especially under slightly different conditions, in the face of high uncertainty, or in a chaotic information environment. It is also difficult to say what — if anything — may be generalisable from a single, unique business situation. To make things worse, what tends to fly in a class discussion is whatever sounds the smartest, not what actually works.

By contrast, calibration cases do not pretend to teach superior decision making. Instead, the approach focuses on only one, high impact learning goal: to accelerate the learner’s ability to sensemake in business. We want learners to spot the same cues that experts see, to have a calibrated sense of frameworks when applied under different conditions, and to have a better sense of how actions may play out when put into difficult business situations. Business and investing is filled with randomness and contingency. In the face of this, we want the learner to never be surprised.

Of course, this tends to result in better business decision making. But it is not the primary goal.

One final way to think about the purpose of calibration cases is this: it is to prepare the investor or business operator to be able to walk into a chaotic business environment, look around dispassionately, and think: “Well, this may be novel, but it is not new. I’ve seen something like this before.”

Sources

Full references to the research underpinning this method and the learning approach may be found on the Learning in Ill-Structured Domains series.

To get a taste of how Commoncog employs calibration cases to enhance business lessons, visit the Commoncog Case Library. Or visit the Commoncog Business Syllabus, to see how calibration cases are integrated into the whole site.

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Originally published 20 April 2025, last updated 18 June 2025.