Mole End

Things that are are easy to measure. (Well, actually, they're not, but that's another section of this blog entirely. For this moment, let us assume they are.) Things that are not, on the other hand, are quite difficult to measure.

The Mole's late mother had a lovely response to a certain class of hypothetical questions. Where others might reply "How should I know?" or "That's just silly", her rejoinder was "If you had a brother, would he like cheese?". This captures the essence of a counter-factual: what can we say about some contingent fact in a set of circumstances that are not? The resolution requires the introduction of some other premise, some hypothesis about the universe in the situation that has not transpired.

Your organization probably does not have KPIs or OKRs or even SLAs for cheese. But The Mole would lay heavy odds that you cannot throw a stone in your office without hitting someone -- ok, HR would not approve of stone-throwing and thanks to SARS-Cov-19 there's probably no one in the office -- who has at some point claimed to have delivered an initiative that saved the company some resource. And there's your cheese: the savings are relative to the expenditure that would have happened had the initiative not been executed.

Without discipline, anyone can concoct an alternative scenario that fits their ends. The savings were huge! The savings were trivial! The savings doubled our profitability! The savings were actually negative!

There is only one answer, for which The Mole is indebted to the wise Wayne Lim: don't launch the savings initiative until the stakeholders have signed off (ideally in blood) on the counter-factual. Since resource consumption is likely to be dynamic and costs are likely to be complex (e.g., comprised of fixed and variable components), the counter-factual must take the form of a model: it must be sufficiently parametrized to account for the relevant actual state of the world at the future time. With such a model in hand it is much more difficult for savings claims to be attacked Big Lebowski style.

And if you must inquire about The Mole's family: everyone loves cheese, so naturally that hypothetical brother would.