Ep 2.26: Lasagna's Law and Building Recruitment Forecasts You Can Actually Trust

Every trial starts with a number on a slide, patients needed, months allotted, a clean straight line on a chart. Liam and Ted pull that line apart in this episode, starting with Lasagna's Law: the 1970s observation that eligible patients seem to vanish the moment a trial opens and reappear the moment it closes. They dig into why recruitment forecasts go wrong not because the math is bad, but because the assumptions underneath the math are never tested, tracked, or even written down. Liam reframes recruitment forecasting using a sat-nav analogy: the plan is your estimated arrival time, the forecast is what updates as you actually drive. Ted brings a wildlife photographer's lens, literally, arguing most sponsors are zoomed in on the wrong details and missing the bigger picture entirely. A grounded, practical conversation for anyone responsible for building a forecast around best-case, worst-case, and base-case scenarios instead of one optimistic line.