Together with the successful podcast, The Sustainability Journey, (https://sustainabilityjourney.podbean.com/) I am starting a new series of articles focusing on interesting startups, talking about change, innovation and entrepreneurship. Meeting change makers around the world providing solutions to business, environmental and social challenges.
For the first article I have met Enzo Troncone.
He is a very dynamic entrepreneur who is on a mission to extend the human capacity to solve complex problems. 95% on the performance of an organization depends how the organization takes decisions, Enzo told us, and noise and biases are present and undermine our decision-making processes.
So he has founded the tech company Butterfly Decisions to help companies trace, improve and speed up decision-making processes. He does that by combining behavioural science and machine learning.
After reading Noise (great book, highly recomended) meeting and talking with Enzo confirmed the importance of decision making in business settings and I asked him to share his story and some impacts he and his team have already delivered.
If you like it, share comment and connect!
1. Who is Enzo and his background
I’m 39 years old, and I was born in a beautiful village in Puglia in southern Italy, Bovino. Mine is a large and very special family: we are eight children, all graduates, our parents tried to make us travel a lot and stimulate our attitudes and our creativity, think that in my family there are 3 startups!
I left home when I was 16, and I studied in a Military School ( Nunziatella Military School in Naples, for those unfamiliar with it, is the oldest military institution in Europe). Since then I can say that I have never stopped!
I then graduated in Management Engineer and worked for over 13 years dealing with project management and planning in companies mainly in the Oil & Oil&Gas, primarily working for large multinationals and medium and small companies.
I have worked on projects of great international importance and highly challenging in various places around the world, including Brazil, Turkey, and Kazakhstan, often holding positions as head of department, manager, or coordinator. At some point in my career, I realized how important decisions were, I got a PhD with research on decision-making in complex environments: Chance willed (a classic example of serendipity) that while I was in Brazil for work, I had the ‘opportunity to continue my research (instead of questioning them until I returned to Italy) by collaborating with a Brazilian scholar (long history how I met him, would require a separate interview!).
This professor was a luminary of logic, with whom I greatly deepened my skills and my vision of problem-solving, Artificial Intelligence and decision-making processes. I realized that I could make a difference by working on the problem of decision-making processes because I had seen that they had a huge impact on the success and sustainability of an organization.
I continued with stubbornness to deal with this problem by deciding to turn it into a business opportunity: I founded Butterfly, my startup (currently I’m the CEO), with which we continued to do R&D on algorithms that would help make decisions more quickly and with less risk, then transforming everything into a software solution that would allow, with elegance and simplicity, the application of scientific procedures in decision-making processes: bringing the Decision Science into the Boardrooms!
Today I’m taking a Distance Learning MBA at Warwick Business School, and I’m happy with this new journey, I’m meeting so many special people and learning a lot!
2. What is the problem that are you trying to solve?
Decision making in the last 50 years have seen an increased academic interest , with several scholars, some of them awareded with Nobel prizes for their research on on the study of decisions (among all scholars it is worth mentioning Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).
I believe that helping humans to make better decisions is the holy grail since decisions are the way we determine our future. And it’s interesting that the “way”, that is the “how” we make decisions, has a huge impact on success of an organization.
In an interesting article by HBR, an impact of 95% on the performance of an organization depends how the organization takes decisions. It is equally clear that very often, organizations, while they can achieve remarkable results, are equally capable of creating disasters, Those who study this discipline often come across case studies where companies, hospitals, military staffs have made obvious mistakes at times for lack of a method that would content to reduce the risks of a decision making process: Because the wonderful thing about knowing how to make decisions is that it can allow us to achieve tremendous results!
3. Why Butterfly? What is it trying to solve?
Butterfly’s vision is precisely this: To extend the human capacity to solve complex problems.
We are doing this through algorithms and digital technologies that help organizations improve the decision-making process which is the crucial phase in which their future is determined and we are doing it by supporting organizations that face highly complex challenges, such as large engineering companies in the energy field, pharmaceutical companies, scientific associations in the medical field and companies that need to set up medium-long term growth strategies.
The decision-making process, if we consider it holistically (and this is how we understand it in Butterfly), it needs to be creative to be effective. It is necessary to generate ideas, evaluate them, improve them, implement them, monitor them and make sure that organizations can learn. ideas for us are a changeable object, they must be able to evolve, just like butterflies do. We favour this and we try to make organizations sensitive to the concept that a simple gesture like take a decisions, has actually a huge impact.
We have a vertical approach to business: Right now we are helping companies in the Pharmaceutical field to improve research tables on new drugs, we are helping large companies in the construction and energy fields to improve their decision-making processes in managing project management strategies.
4. Can you share some impact stories?
We started our business by supplying our technology in prototype version to scientific associations in the medical field. They have successfully used it to manage decisions on complex clinical cases. In this type of applications the tool has been fundamental to distill the feedbacks of a panel of experts, successfully managing decisions on complex pathologies such as cancer cases. Among our first customers, we had a small company in the pharmaceutical field, indeed nutraceuticals, the Geopharma.
During Covid, the company saw its turnover drop because it had to stop the activity of medical-scientific information. In that period Geopharma started a profound internal reorganization and digitalization project: they came into contact with us and used Butterfly for their own R&D and strategy processes. With Butterfly they created enlarged virtual decision-making tables by submitting various points on the new growth strategy to be adopted by their sales force. The nice thing about Geopharma is that when its sales force was at home, it proactively involved them in this activity, using Butterfly as a collaborative decision-making tool. The algorithms within the system then allowed R&D and management to identify insights (combining and analyzing feedback from their sales force) then used to build the growth strategy (in full pandemic) and providing unexpected feedback and data then used for new product lines. The company that year saw its turnover grow by about 50% and we are happy to have made our small contribution to this success. The CEO of Geopharma then decided to become our partner. I would say a good result!
5. The way forward for Butterfly
I would like to share what is happening now and then talk about the future: a few months ago we launched the advanced commercial version of our tool that we are offering mostly to large corporate. We are working on pilot projects with several multinationals companies, they are really leaders in their fields and we felt really honored to have received their interest. It’s a very challenging time for us, but absolutely thrilling!
As a startup, we are extremely resilient and flexible, we would like to keep this approach. We have faced great challenges and to face them, we certainly need to be able to attract talent: From this point of view, we want to become attractive place to work: today it has become a necessity, rightly workers have become demanding, especially after the pandemic. We want to create a pleasantly unique work environment and put those who work with us in the conditions to be able to do it anywhere. In terms of technology, we believe in an increasingly integrated approach: in the past, companies have spent enormous capital on information systems for collecting and analyzing data, which however are often not used in the decision-making process and in creating effective learning and improvement processes, not helping effectively in managing their challenges and solving complex problems, perhaps in the best cases they yield 20-30% of what they could. This is not good for us.
We want to revolutionize the approach to using data to connect it to decisions and creating wisdom and knowledge in a process of real continuous improvement. Looking a little further to the horizon (not that far away because we are already working on it) we believe in an ever and better man-machine integration. We ourselves are carriers of information. We think that these can be detected and integrated in the decision-making process. . here I mean the possibility of integrating and analyzing our thoughts and using this data to reduce decision-making risks.
Want to learn more? https://butterflydecisions.com/?lang=en