Mr. One Variable

Mr. One Variable wakes up on one fine Monday morning. He bought a cup of coffee on his way to the office. It’s a brand new coffee shop with slightly too sweet coffee. He drank it and immediately rate the coffee shop 2 out of 5. Little did he knows that the coffee shop vaults one of the best pastry in the town. Mr. One Variable continues his walk and saw a child jaywalking the street. “He must be very naughty at school,” he thinks. Mr. One Variable finally arrives at the office just in time to witness the TV news about the vulcanic eruption and think how dreadful is to have something like that happening on earth.

Mr. One Variable acts as if every complex issue has only one variable. That life is not made in a spectrum of color but merely black and white. That a person is made from one dimension instead of many. That an event must be fully beneficial or fully detrimental. How simple Mr. One Variable. How wrong he is.?

In the real world, one particular property seldom represents the whole entity. A shop that serves bad coffee does not necessarily serve a bad pastry too (one is made by a barista, the other by the chef, anyway). A misbehaved kid might – or might not - score well in class. And a volcanic eruption, however horrible the impact is to the adjacent community, is a good sign of good circulating energy of the earth. There is a multi-chapter in a single story.

This multi-variability also appears in the business world. In my experience as a quality gatekeeper, whenever a gap in quality occurred, quality integrity should be in principle. However, I also need to oversee other variables at play. In an event of rejected product, was the product truly bad? Or is it some testing equipment malfunctioning? Was it a bad product to begin with, or was it deteriorating during storage? Am I using the correct specification to check? If I reject the product, will the supply chain be disrupted? Supposedly I just reprocessed or downgrade the product, can it still be acceptable?

Many things to consider, and many variables need to take into account. Many ways to Rome, we need just to make sure it’s not heading to Milan. ?

Now, the decision on multivariability might be confusing. How to draw a conclusion when there are so many factors to consider? These 3 principles might be useful.

1. Decide what matters most. Let’s cosplay as Mr. One Variable for a while (but not for too long). What will be the single decisive factor? Be it quality, cost, customer satisfaction, or anything. This is usually derived from your personal value or business decision.
2. Be divergent. Don’t focus only on your vantage point. Be clear what other stakeholders’ expectations as well. If I select quality, how this will impact the supply chain team? How will this cost-saving project interfere with the operational capabilities? Can other variables be adjusted? If so...
3. Embrace the consequences. At the end of the day, we need to realize that we’re not an ice cream that can make everybody happy. Most of the time, there will be one, if not several, parties that think they are put in a disadvantageous position. We need to be very clear about how to console this.

Learn not only to see any event for what it is but what it impacts. See a person not only by their name but by the stories behind them. Being a single variable is easy, but most of the time we need to choose what is right over what is easy.