Treacherous

thoughts on retention and engagement

Not going to share where, but I recently overheard a conversation that bothered me quite a bit. I’ll paraphrase to protect, but it was something like this:

We had a lot of people leave our organization during ‘The Great Resignation’, but we’ve made changes, and now our turnover numbers are the lowest ever.

Causation, Correlation, and Critical Thinking

It may be obvious where I want to go with this, but first I want to think about this hypothesis - which essentially is, “We changed, and now fewer people are leaving” (We did X, and now Y improved).

Let’s tear this apart using some well-known critical thinking heuristics.

• Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: This is where one might incorrectly assume that since event Y (people not leaving their jobs) followed event X (the effort in retention), that event X caused event Y. I will guess that no such investigation was done. Which is, of course, highly related to the more common…

• Correlation vs. Causation: Just because retention improved after an action wa…