Data-Driven Decision-Making

A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing

The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Data-Driven Decision-Making course, in the Business Development category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.

This is the course for every professional who decides with numbers — managers and team leads whose staffing, scheduling, budget, and priority decisions rest on quoted numbers, analysts, project leads, and operators who produce or consume reports and dashboards, owners and consultants whose recommendations carry money with them, and capable people whose judgment undersells them. It works in the order the work has to happen: first, Module 1 — Frame the Decision, Know the Number: The Question, the Metric, and the Honest Count — frame the decision before the data, state what evidence would change your mind, choose what to measure, interrogate what a metric actually counts, keep denominators and base rates in view, read averages beside distributions, size small samples honestly, and compare like against like, finishing with The Decision Framed Right; then, Module 2 — Read the Evidence Honestly: Cause, Charts, and the Recommendation — separate correlation from cause, read charts honestly and price how they mislead, read change against baselines, count both sides of every trade-off, decide inside stated ranges, update when the data changes, present a recommendation as claim, evidence, and limits, and sign your own decision standard, finishing with The Recommendation That Holds Up. You finish by proving the whole course — in The Decision Framed Right and in The Recommendation That Holds Up. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.

The signature, stated plainly. This course works on your actual decisions. Most data courses teach about charts and leave your next real decision exactly as unsupported as the last one. This one does not: bring a real decision — one you face at work, with the numbers you actually have — anonymized where it needs to be, and the Coach will make you frame it, check its evidence, and defend it, concept by concept, until the recommendation holds up. One rule protects that signature, and it is absolute: do not paste anything you are not free to share: change the names, change the figures, keep the shape of the problem. Both capstones produce real artifacts — a framed decision and a rebuilt recommendation — not just ideas about deciding. The course also works under a fence, and the fence is absolute: this course cites no real-world research findings, every worked example uses illustrative numbers — fictional companies and round sample data presented as examples, never as findings — and every computation is shown step by step so you can check the arithmetic yourself. It names no software products as recommendations: the craft works with a pencil, a spreadsheet, or whatever system your workplace already runs.

This is the forty-ninth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person training Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.