How Market Research Tricks Leaders into Making The Wrong Decisions
Jon Cohen spent decades calling elections before founding an AI company built to fix his own industry.
I sat down with Jon Cohen, founder and CEO of TrueDot.ai, who spent his career running polling at ABC News, the Washington Post, and Pew before becoming chief research officer at SurveyMonkey. We talk about why he never let himself get promoted out of the actual work, what it felt like calling presidential elections on deadline, and why he thinks executive fit depends on leaders getting real data instead of numbers designed to look good.
Jon walks through the Michigan Senate primary that upended pre-election polling, and the idea he coined to explain it: plausibility is not validity. We get into why so much market research is built for number generation instead of truth seeking, how leadership coaching programs and executive coaching for leaders could benefit from the same kind of rigor pollsters apply to their own data, and why checking numbers by hand has quietly been the way researchers train judgment for generations. Jon also talks about what happens to that training pipeline as AI takes over the checking work itself, and where the next generation of deep expertise actually comes from.
This conversation also gets into culture fit inside research teams, the discipline of asking a genuinely useful question instead of an easy one, and why leadership fit so often comes down to whether a leader is willing to hear the truth instead of the number that makes the trend line go up.
Key takeaways:
- Jon built a system to ingest historical polling data because scarcity forced him to do more with less at both the Washington Post and ABC News
- The Michigan Senate primary showed how pre-election polls and prediction markets can all be wrong in the same direction at once
- Plausibility is not validity: a number can sound reasonable and still be wrong, and leaders need a system for testing which one they are looking at
- Most market research is built to keep a trend line moving up and to the right, not to generate genuine insight
- Checking numbers by hand has traditionally been how researchers develop judgment, and AI tools that automate that step raise real questions about how the next generation learns
- Jon's advice against choosing a career too early shaped a path that took him from a history degree to programming to running polling operations
- Executive coaching for leaders and leadership coaching programs benefit from the same rigor Jon applies to survey design: know what you will do with the answer before you ask the question
Fit Happens is hosted by Jason Baumgarten, Former Head of the Global CEO and Board Practice at Spencer Stuart. The show covers CEO succession, hiring a CEO, board of directors dynamics and governance and leadership fit and performance. New episodes every week at fithappens.fm
Connect with Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbaumgarten/
Email the show here: jason@fithappens.fm
Email the show here: jason@fithappens.fm
00:00 Cold open
00:47 Welcome, Jon Cohen
01:15 From history major to predicting the future
02:57 Policy institute versus the newsroom
05:50 Calling elections at the Washington Post
09:14 What got easier and harder in polling
14:18 Building TrueDot to fix the industry
19:11 Democratizing research tools for executives
23:44 The Michigan Senate primary surprise
27:16 Plausibility is not validity
33:11 The researcher in the loop
36:20 Where does the next Jon Cohen come from
45:19 Speed round
51:11 Closing thoughts
