Where that number comes from

The problem it solves

The meeting stops at the first number. Sales for the month: one figure in the system, another in the spreadsheet the manager keeps, and a third in the deck someone assembled from the two. Half an hour later the meeting has not discussed the business. It has discussed which of the three figures to use today.

None of them is entirely wrong, and that is the point. One counts a sale when it is invoiced, another when it is collected. One includes shipping, the other separates it. One carries a manual adjustment somebody made at the time for a sound reason nobody now remembers. The gap does not come from an arithmetic error. It comes from never having written down what was being counted.

The gap costs the company in two ways. The first is leadership time spent reconciling instead of deciding. The second is dearer: when two figures live side by side for months, the team stops believing either of them, and from that moment any argument about results can be won by choosing the convenient source.

What it covers

The workshop takes the indicator as given. What to measure is not the question here. Where the thing already being measured comes from is. The first section is spent writing definitions: what enters the figure, what stays out, at what moment it counts, and what happens to the borderline cases. The argument about when something counts usually explains, on its own, much of the disagreement the team has been carrying.

Then a figure is traced. In a guided exercise, participants follow a published number backwards, step by step, to the record it was born in, noting every point along the way where somebody touched it: a cut-off date, a change of system, an export, a column added by hand. That journey is almost always longer than anyone expected when they started.

The central block is reconciliation. Given a case with two reports measuring the same thing and disagreeing, the group has to find the difference, explain it in one line somebody who was not there can follow, and decide which of the two becomes the system of record. The hard part is not the arithmetic. It is agreeing who answers for that figure from tomorrow, and what happens to the version that loses.

The close sets accountability: one metric, one origin, one person who answers. The group also identifies the signs that a figure is not trustworthy yet, and agrees what gets said in the meantime, because publishing a doubtful number without flagging it costs more than publishing nothing and waiting a week.

What participants learn

• Write the exact definition of an indicator: what is included, what is left out, and when it counts.
• Trace a published figure backwards to the record it came from.
• Identify the manual adjustments that happen between the system and the report, and who knows about them.
• Apply a reconciliation procedure to two reports that measure the same thing and disagree.
• Define the system of record for each metric and the person accountable for it.

Agenda

1. 01Writing a definition: in, out, and the moment it counts
2. 02System of record: one metric, one origin
3. 03The journey of a figure from entry to slide
4. 04Cut-off dates and why they move the result
5. 05Manual adjustments: where they happen and who knows about them
6. 06When two reports disagree: how to reconcile and what to say
7. 07Signs a figure is not trustworthy yet
8. 08Accountability for every published number

What the organisation leaves with

• Written definitions for the indicators the company publishes, with their borderline cases settled.
• A register of the system of record per metric, with the person who answers for each one.
• The trace of one figure from report back to originating record, with manual adjustments marked.
• An agreed rule for the case where two reports of the same metric disagree.