The blue light from the 41st slide is vibrating against my retinas with the intensity of a dying star. I can smell the over-extracted coffee, a bitter, burnt scent that has permeated this conference room for exactly 111 minutes. We are looking at a heatmap that is so aggressively red it looks like a digital crime scene. The data is screaming. It is not just talking; it is standing on the table and howling that the new checkout flow is a disaster. Users are dropping off at the payment screen like flies hitting an electric bug zapper.
And yet, the VP of Growth, a man whose $171 silk tie seems to be the only thing holding his confidence together, leans back and sighs. He looks at the data, then he looks at us, and then he looks at some invisible point on the ceiling.
“Interesting data,” he says, and I know exactly where this is going because I have been in this room 51 times before. “But my gut tells me we just need to market it better. People aren’t seeing the value proposition. Let’s push forward with the original June 1st launch date.”
The Physicist vs. The Vibe
I think about Kendall F.T. often in these moments. Kendall is a carnival ride inspector, a man who spends his days looking for hairline fractures in steel beams that are destined to spin teenagers around at 41 miles per hour. Kendall doesn’t care about ‘vibes.’ He doesn’t care if the carnival owner has a ‘good feeling’ about the structural integrity of the main axle. Kendall has a 1-point checklist: either the metal is solid, or it isn’t.
“They think history is a guarantee,” Kendall told me while tapping a suspicious bolt. “They think because it didn’t break yesterday, the math of friction and fatigue has decided to take a holiday. But physics doesn’t have an ego. It just waits.”
– Kendall F.T., Carnival Inspector
Corporate strategy is just a carnival ride with higher stakes and fewer funnel cakes. We ignore the fractures because we are in love with the motion. We want to believe that our ‘vision’ is a force of nature that can overcome the friction of reality. This reminds me of the three hours I spent last week explaining the internet to my grandmother. She couldn’t understand how a photo of a sourdough loaf could travel through the air and land on her tablet. To her, it was magic, and if the magic didn’t work, it was because the ‘air was too thick’ that day. My VP is my grandmother, only he has a 1-million-dollar budget and a preference for Patagonia vests.
The Cost of Ignored Signals
Feature Adoption
Feature Adoption
Weaponizing Metrics
We pretend that we are being scientific. We hire data scientists with PhDs and pay them 201 thousand dollars a year to build models that are works of art. But when those models suggest that our flagship product is actually a confusing mess of features that nobody asked for, we treat the data scientist like a harbinger of doom rather than a navigator. We ask for ‘more slices.’ We ask for ‘longitudinal studies.’ We ask for anything that will delay the inevitable realization that we are wrong.
The Weaponization of Inconclusiveness
It’s a peculiar kind of masochism. We spend 511 hours a month collecting metrics on everything from button-click latency to the sentiment of Twitter mentions, yet when it comes time to actually steer the ship, we throw the compass overboard because we like the look of the horizon better without it. The data is used as a weapon, not a tool. “The data was inconclusive,” is the corporate version of “The dog ate my homework.”
I remember one specific project where we had 11 different metrics showing that a new subscription tier was cannibalizing our main revenue stream. It was clear as day. A 1st grader could have seen the trend line. But the project lead had staked her entire career on this launch. She didn’t see data; she saw a threat to her promotion. She spent 31 minutes during the quarterly review explaining why the data was actually ‘screwing the narrative’ and that we needed to look at ‘soft metrics’ like brand resonance. Brand resonance is what people talk about when they don’t have a profit margin.
The Courage to Be Wrong
In a world where everyone ignores the blinking red light, finding Push Store instead of just painting the car a faster color feels like finding a hidden gem. It’s a rare thing to see a system that respects the signal over the noise. Most systems are just Echo Chambers with better graphic design.
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We are drowning in information but starving for the courage to act on it.
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Why is it so hard to be wrong? I’ve been wrong 81 times this year alone. Acknowledging a mistake is the only way to stop making it. But in a leadership structure that prizes ‘decisiveness’ and ‘strength,’ admitting that the data has proven your hypothesis false is seen as a weakness. We would rather sail the ship into an iceberg with our heads held high than admit we missed the turn 11 miles back.
The Mechanic’s Stance
Kendall F.T. eventually shut down that Tilt-A-Whirl. He knew that his job wasn’t to be liked; it was to ensure that the 101 people who got on that ride that night got off it with all their limbs attached. We need more Kendalls in the C-suite. We need people who are more afraid of the reality of the crack than the anger of the owner.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being right and being ignored. It’s the gap between how the world works and how we wish it worked. We keep building these elaborate dashboards, these 1-stop-shops for ‘truth,’ but we forget that truth is a bitter pill. We want the dashboard to be a mirror that makes us look thinner. When they don’t, we don’t change our behavior; we just change the dashboard. We hide the ‘bad’ KPIs on the third page of the report, buried under 151 pages of fluff and ‘future projections.’
The Cost of Delusion
If we aren’t willing to be humiliated by the data, then the 171 sensors we’ve placed on the customer journey are just expensive decorations. They are the digital equivalent of a security guard who is paid to look the other way. The VP, with his $171 tie, is not a bad man, but he has been rewarded for his ‘gut’ for 21 years.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll present the 41st slide again. Or maybe I’ll just take my grandmother to the carnival and hope Kendall has been there first. It’s easier to deal with a rusty bolt than a broken ego, mostly because the bolt doesn’t try to convince you that the rust is actually a ‘vintage aesthetic.’
The Bolt
Responds to physics.
The Ego
Resists reality.
The Spin
How many slides left?
As I pack up my laptop, I notice the VP is already on his phone, likely looking for a new marketing agency to fix the problem that doesn’t exist in the marketing, but in the marrow of the product itself. He’s looking for a way to validate his gut one more time. I wonder how many more 41st slides it will take before the ride finally stops spinning for good.