Much of Stratogenic started as notes I needed. Evidence-Based Life did too.
I could usually describe what I wanted to build. The harder question was what I knew. A customer conversation felt encouraging, but had anybody committed? A product idea made sense on paper, but what happened when somebody used it? A full week could still leave the important work where it was on Monday.
By Tuesday afternoon, Monday’s clean story often had dents. That was information, if I resisted explaining it away.
The working loop that came out of this was:
Notice → Understand → Decide → Act → Observe → Review → Adapt
I call the wider method Evidence-Based Life, or EBL. It sits underneath the books, the OS and much of the catalogue. It is not an instruction to turn a life into a spreadsheet. It is a way to let experience answer back.
The problem EBL is trying to hold
Ambition matters to me. So does hope. Neither becomes evidence simply because the feeling is strong.
The opposite mistake is possible too. Evidence can become a respectable word for fear: one more report before speaking to a customer, another forecast before choosing, another framework before doing the small thing that might prove the idea wrong.
EBL tries to keep both errors in view. You are allowed to want something before you can prove it will work. Once that desire begins to involve time, money or other people, it owes reality a conversation.
That conversation needs more than data. It may include research, records, professional experience, somebody else’s account, practical constraints and unknowns. Those sources are not interchangeable. A confident interpretation remains an interpretation. A customer saying “interesting” is not a sale. A dashboard is not the whole experience behind the number.
Seven verbs, because a decision has to move
Notice comes before the explanation. Write down what changed, what was said and what you expected. It is difficult when a preferred story is already available.
Understand sorts the material. What is observed, reported, inferred, assumed or unknown? Who is affected and who can decide? What would weaken the current account?
Decide makes a choice visible. Often it is the next proportionate move, its boundary and its review point.
Act lets the world disagree. It might be a customer question, product test, difficult conversation or decision to stop. The action has to touch the uncertainty that matters.
Observe records the result before memory makes it kinder, harsher or neater. What happened is allowed to be mixed.
Review looks back at the judgement, not the person. A good decision can meet bad luck. A careless one can get away with it. The review asks whether the evidence and care were proportionate.
Adapt gives learning somewhere to go. Continue, revise, reduce the risk, ask for help, change the measure, or stop. A method that only ever recommends persistence is protecting the original desire, not learning.
What consultative sales taught me about evidence
Sales makes the difference between a story and a shared decision visible very quickly.
A seller can describe a customer’s problem beautifully and still be wrong. Discovery can become a performance in which every answer is translated back into the offer. Forecast calls can reward certainty at the exact moment the evidence is asking for a qualification question.
The useful habits travel well beyond sales: stay curious before advising; separate the customer’s words from your interpretation; make the trade-off visible; ask for a next step that means something; and allow no decision to remain a legitimate outcome.
That is why EBL appears in Stratogenic tools for strategy, business development, customer success and AI deployment. The rooms are different. The discipline is recognisable. A decision should say what supports it, what could change it and who will carry what happens next.
Building Stratogenic this way
Narrative Studio is where the books and tools are built, sourced, tested and held behind release gates. The OS is intended to carry evidence and decisions into ongoing work. Clarity helps someone find the relevant part of the catalogue. Those are different jobs, and building them has repeatedly shown me why the full loop matters.
A catalogue can look complete while the delivery route is not ready. A generated document can pass a technical test and still feel dead in a person’s hands. An AI pilot can work on the chosen examples and fail at the edge that matters in use. The answer is not to call all of it failure. It is to record the actual state and change the next decision.
The philosophy is in The Evidence-Based Life; the Kindle edition is on Amazon UK. Other products apply it to particular situations. They do not prove EBL works for everybody. Each standalone tool remains usable without the book.
Why I wrote Tuesday Afternoon
Frameworks tidy things. Life does not volunteer to stay tidy.
I wrote Tuesday Afternoon because some questions needed people, consequence and a little firelight rather than another diagram. Writing it was also cathartic. It gave me a way to make sense of the world without claiming I had solved it.
The stories are fiction, not customer cases and not evidence that a lesson is universally true. They let a character remember an event one way, then make room for the person who paid for that version of the story. For me, that belongs inside EBL. Evidence can correct a story without making stories unnecessary. Meaning can be honest without pretending to be proof.
Put one circling decision through the loop
Take one decision that keeps circling. Give each of the seven verbs one plain sentence. Leave “I don’t know” where it is true. Then choose the smallest responsible action that could return information and set a time to look again.
If the loop clarifies the situation, keep using it. If it flattens something important, change the method. EBL has to remain answerable to the same standard it asks of a life.
Sources and limits
- John Dewey, How We Think — an intellectual ancestor for reflection that moves from difficulty towards tested meaning. It is philosophical and educational work, not evidence that the seven-part EBL loop improves outcomes.
- Denise M. Rousseau, “Is There Such a Thing as Evidence-Based Management?” — informs the plural relationship between research, expertise, context and affected interests in professional decisions. It does not validate EBL or settle which evidence should govern a particular choice.
Sources reviewed 7 September 2026. EBL is an owned framework informed by a wider corpus; neither source endorses Stratogenic or its products.