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?

What are Calibration Cases?

Calibration cases are cases that teach you to see. You are expected to read and revisit between 10-20 cases on each business concept in order to calibrate your understanding of the concept or framework in practice. With time, you will learn to notice concepts of your own, and will intuitively begin to collect cases from your own experiences, in the wild.

The specific thing that calibration cases accomplish is that they help speed up your pattern recognition. What does this mean?

One important facet of expertise is that skilled practitioners can see things that novices cannot. In the expertise research literature, 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. 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 yourself.

How Calibration Cases Work

Business and investing — like medicine and warfighting — 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: just because you know the concept, or have learnt it from a mentor, or have studied it in a textbook, doesn’t mean that you can recognise it when you experience it in the wild.

The real problem with learning in ill-structured domains is the constant novelty. Medicine turns out to be a good example of this. When expertise researchers studied novice doctors, for instance, they learnt 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.
• Novice 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 able to reach a diagnosis quickly and effectively. But how do you train novice doctors to do the same, quickly, when symptoms are always somewhat novel on a case-by-case basis?

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.
• For business operators, the path to a competitive advantage is almost always dependent on the specific business model, the competitive set, the technology landscape, and the capital markets of that specific point in time.

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 have two things that novices do not:

1. They have 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, because they know case comparison lies at the heart of their expertise.

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 and the second 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 years that it has been used. 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 in the face of high uncertainty, under slightly different conditions, or in a chaotic information environment. It is 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 — at least not directly. Instead, it focuses on only one, high impact learning goal: to accelerate the learner’s ability to sensemake in business. This means being able to spot the same cues that experts see across many cases, to have a calibrated sense of how a framework can look like when applied under different conditions, and to have a better sense of how things may go 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 20 April 2025.