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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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! <\/p>\n
There is only one answer, for which The Mole is indebted to the wise [Wayne Lim](https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/5510723-managing-software-re-use): 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](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j95kNwZw8YY).<\/p>\n
And if you must inquire about The Mole’s family: *everyone* loves cheese, so naturally that hypothetical brother would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.… Continue reading I am the very model of a modern counter-factual<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mole-end","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}