Business Case Studies & Business Publications

Presenting Predictive Versus Causal Resu...

Palomba, Anthony

Technical Note

Presenting Predictive Versus Causal Results

Palomba, Anthony

PHA-0090 | Published September 8, 2026 | 14 Pages Technical Note

Collection: Darden School of Business

Product Details

This technical note is a stand-alone pedagogical resource intended to support instruction on (a) how to structure a quantitative presentation and (b) how to think about, interpret, and communicate predictive versus causal results in data-driven work. It is not attached to a specific case and is deliberately designed to travel across domains, including marketing, finance, strategy, policy, and operations, where quantitative evidence is routinely used to justify decisions. The emphasis is not on estimation techniques themselves, but on the intellectual discipline and rhetorical responsibility required when presenting results to nontechnical decision-makers. The level of precision required in this context places tremendous responsibility on the presenter to carefully communicate findings to audiences. In practice, many of the most consequential failures in analytics are not statistical but communicative: Analysts overstate what models can do, decision-makers misunderstand what evidence permits, and organizations act on claims that exceed what the data can defensibly support. This note is meant to establish a shared conceptual vocabulary and a set of norms that will help students and executives avoid these failures.