A domino is a small oblong tile marked with 0-6 pips in each half. It is used to play a variety of games in which players try to place them so that their ends match those on the other end of a line already laid down. The resulting chains of matching ends are scored and the first player to score all of their tiles wins the game.

As a child, Lily Hevesh loved playing with her grandparents’ classic 28-piece set of dominoes. She would spend hours setting them up in straight or curved lines, then flicking the first one—and watching the entire sequence fall in unison, domino after domino. Now she’s a professional domino artist, creating spectacular setups for movies, TV shows, and events—including a recent album launch by pop star Katy Perry. Hisvesh’s work is so impressive that she has a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers.

She has found that the key to her success lies in understanding how forces like gravity and friction affect the way a line of dominoes falls. As a physicist, she understands that when you stand a domino upright, you’re applying a force to it against the pull of gravity. Over time, this energy is converted from potential energy, which depends on the position of the domino, to kinetic energy—the energy of motion.

When it comes to writing, the domino effect can be useful in plotting a story. The process of writing a novel is, at its core, about reaction—what happens to your protagonist and the people around them as a result of their actions? If you want your reader to care about your character, you need to know how to create a story that will draw them in.

Domino’s Pizza has built its business around the idea that customer service is paramount to its success. As a result, the company pays close attention to what customers are saying—and has even had its CEO go undercover in stores to see how employees treat them.

This value also applies to the company’s leadership structure. When David Brandon became Domino’s CEO in 2007, he took a hands-on approach to improving the company by talking to employees and listening to their complaints. He quickly implemented changes, including a more relaxed dress code and new leadership training programs.

Domino Data Lab’s centralized model execution and storage enables you to trace results back to the code and data that generated them. This enables you to apply access controls to different collaborators, merge and detect conflicts, and track changes. And it means that anyone who needs to see a result can do so with a simple self-service web form—without having to ask you for a copy of the source code or data file. For your internal stakeholders, this makes it easy for them to run your models with their own parameter values—without having to email you. All of this is possible because Domino can store and run your models as lightweight REST APIs.