Curtiss Witt
Co-CEO of The Black Friday Agency and the originator of Conversational Customer Acquisition — a systems thinker, not a conventional marketer.
The Through-Line Behind CCA
Conversational Customer Acquisition did not begin as a marketing theory. It grew out of more than three decades of learning how complex systems work, why organizations become trapped by outdated processes, and how better information and better tools can help people make better decisions.
Curtiss spent approximately thirty years at Boeing, from 1989 to 2019, working in leadership, program management, executive development, process improvement, innovation, and organizational transformation. He managed elements of the Boeing Executive Program and led significant process-improvement and cost-reduction initiatives.
At Boeing, he learned to view an organization as a system, drawing from Lean, the Theory of Constraints, Agile methods, value-stream thinking, and structured innovation. The larger lesson mattered most: visible problems are often symptoms — the real work is finding the constraint controlling the system.
Innovation Must Be Made Usable
Curtiss came to believe that innovation needed structure — a repeatable process rather than a one-time event. That conviction led to the development of the 8Rs Innovation framework, his attempt to turn innovation into an operating discipline rather than a motivational exercise.
That same philosophy led him toward simulation-based and experiential learning. As a co-inventor of experiential business and educational simulations — including The Renewable Energy Game — he became convinced of something fundamental: a document can explain, a presentation can persuade, a simulation can engage, but a decision tool can help someone act. That distinction became central to CCA and to the idea of the Decision Support Asset.
Selected Works
Gaming to Innovate
How games and simulations help people learn, experiment, collaborate, and solve problems differently.
InEvitable: The Rise of Digital Intelligence
The growing role of intelligent systems and the transformation as machines become more capable of reasoning, creating, and recommending.
UnCited...UnSeen
On the risk of trustworthy expertise being overlooked in a world increasingly mediated by intelligent systems.
Areas of Experience
“Trustworthy expertise should not disappear simply because the machines influencing future decisions cannot understand it.”
Read the Book
Conversational Customer Acquisition 2.0 brings three decades of systems thinking together into a practical guide for the AI era.