Every board pack has a page that settles arguments. It has three columns, confident decimals, and the quiet authority of arithmetic. It is also, more often than anyone admits, a fiction wearing a spreadsheet’s clothes — precise about a world that was estimated in a hurry.
Precision is not accuracy
The model that prices a market to two decimal places rests on a handful of assumptions someone chose on a Tuesday. The decimals survive; the assumptions are forgotten. By the third meeting the number has hardened into a fact, and dissent sounds like innumeracy. The confidence belongs to the formatting, not the forecast.
Interrogate the Tuesday
The remedy is not fewer numbers but better manners with them. Attach every headline figure to its weakest assumption, in the same font size. Ask what would have to be true, and who last checked. A board that knows where the guesswork lives can use the arithmetic for what it is — a way of thinking, not a substitute for it.
Written by
Michael Brennan
Partner
Michael leads our work with industrial and logistics clients. Before Hallam he ran operations for a mid-market manufacturer, which still shapes how he thinks about plans that have to survive contact with a factory floor.
