Five steps to get the best out of your causal project
In this section, we’ll discuss five steps that can help you maximize the potential of your causal project.
Starting with a question
Starting with a well-defined question is a necessary step of any scientific or business endeavor, but it has special importance in causality.
A well-defined question can transform an impossible problem into a tractable one. Causal modeling can sometimes be a divide-and-conquer game, and various challenges that might initially seem impossible to tackle can be addressed (sometimes relatively easily) if we’re open to refining our questions.
For instance, one mistake that I observe in the industry is starting with very broad questions regarding a complete causal model of a process, or even an entire organization/organizational unit. In certain cases, building such a complete model might be very difficult, very costly, or both.
Often, answering one or two well-defined causal...
