Ice Cream Causes Drowning (When Numbers Lie)

VP of Sales storms into your office: "I ran the numbers—our email campaigns drive revenue! Every time we send emails, sales go up. Send more emails!" Sounds great, right? Except you dig deeper and find out sales go up on Mondays. You send emails on Mondays. Sales would've gone up anyway. The emails did nothing. But leadership is already budgeting for a bigger email team. It's the classic trap: ice cream sales correlate with drowning deaths. Both happen in summer. One doesn't cause the other. But if you don't understand causation, you might ban ice cream to save lives. Misunderstanding correlation leads to terrible decisions, wasted budget, and looking like an idiot when it doesn't work.