Show Which Rule Mattered

Every input is on the screen now, with its value and its source. The explanation is honest and complete.

A seller looks at a record classified as not a prospect. Eleven inputs are displayed. Nine of them look positive. He cannot work out why the answer went the way it did, and neither can the marketing operations manager he asks, so they escalate it, and somebody spends forty minutes reconstructing the logic by hand. The rule that decided it was the second one evaluated. Everything after it was recorded but never consulted, because the decision had already stopped.

Complete is not the same as clear

Showing all the evidence is necessary and insufficient. A reader needs to know which piece of it was load-bearing.

Name the deciding rule: the single rule or step that determined this outcome. For a short-circuit, it is the rule that fired. For a decision that evaluated everything, it is the criterion that failed, or the last one that had to pass.

Not a prospect. Rule 1, direction of intent: the message offers services to GTM Lab rather than requesting to buy. Evaluation stopped here; rules 2 to 5 were not consulted.

That last clause is worth including. A reader who can see that nine inputs were never evaluated will not spend forty minutes wondering why they did not matter.

Show what would have changed the answer

The most useful thing an explanation can carry is the counterfactual: what would have to be different for this to come out otherwise. It converts an explanation from something a person reads into something a person can act on. A seller looking at a nurture classification does not primarily want to know why. He wants to know whether it is worth doing anything about, and the answer to that is what would move it.

Keep and nurture. Rule 4, company scale: below the threshold GTM Lab sells to, on a revenue figure observed 41 days ago. This would classify as route to a seller if the revenue figure were at or above threshold. All other criteria passed.

Now the seller has something to do. If he knows the company has grown, there is a specific field with a specific staleness, and correcting it changes the outcome for a reason everybody can see. The counterfactual also exposes bad rules faster than any review process. A rule whose counterfactual reads as obviously unreasonable gets challenged the first week, by whoever it inconveniences, which is exactly who should be challenging it.

One caution

State the counterfactual only for the deciding rule, and only where it is genuinely simple. A list of every input and how much each would need to move is not an explanation; it is a second puzzle. If the honest answer is that several things would need to change together, say that rather than enumerating.

Carry this into your business

Take an automated decision your team receives and ask somebody who did not build it to explain a single result from what is displayed. Time it. That number is your explanation quality, and it is usually a surprise.