Don't always follow the numbers
As an architecture student, my father designed a closet and went to the woodworking room to have some planks cut to the correct size. He had marked the planks with a pencil and handed them to the person operating the saw. They inspected the markings and then, to his surprise, asked him whether he wanted to cut to the left of the marking, on the marking, or slightly to the right of the marking. He had thought his marking was precise enough, but the saw operator worked at an even more detailed level of precision.
I’ve been figuring this out myself, fixing up the new house I bought recently. Measuring and cutting stuff is so much more complicated than I had first thought, and I’ll give you an example: if you would cut a one-meter piece of wood right in half, what would you be left with? Two half-meter fragments of wood, right? That’s what your calculator would say. One hundred divided by two is fifty.
If you trust your calculator and common sense, you’d be a lousy carpenter because you would be left with two pieces, each slightly smaller than fifty centimetres since the saw blade is almost 2 millimetres wide. After the cut, you need to sand your materials, which will also take off a tiny bit, and then paint it, which could add some width.
When I started measuring stuff, I used an ordinary pencil to mark things off. Then I moved on to a finer pencil, and now I often use a knife to make a sharp and very narrow marking where I need to cut. And then I still have to figure out whether I need to make my cut to the left or right of the knife marking on the wood. Then you have to anticipate the sanding and painting, and you’re still not done yet because now you have to measure the humidity of the wood and find out whether it will shrink or expand as it dries.
It’s another one of those examples where simply following the numbers isn’t enough. You need to understand where the numbers come from, whether they’re static or dynamic, and whether you have all the numbers you need to make the correct calculations. A hundred divided by two is only fifty when you use a calculator or spreadsheet. In practice, it’s usually less than fifty, give or take a few numbers, and as my father found out, a saw cut takes up space too.
If you’re looking for an analogy to doing business, here’s one: I once moved my whole company to a new office because it was cheaper, but then failed to predict its devastating effect on morale. The new office was nowhere near as lovely as the original one and not as central. People hated it, and it cost me dearly. My calculator and spreadsheet said it was the right decision, but I should’ve known better.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten Founder, TNW
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