Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

CHAPTER 13

A Refresher on Statistical Significance

by Amy Gallo

When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are significant. But business relevance (that is, practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (that is, statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand.

To better understand what statistical significance really means, I talked with Thomas Redman, author of Data Driven: Profiting from Your ...