The Two Spreadsheets
Field Note 05 · The Schema
There is a meeting that happens in almost every organisation. I have seen it in financial services, aquaculture, retail, and insurance. The details change. The structure never does.
Two departments walk into a room. Both have prepared. Both have spreadsheets. Both are confident in their numbers. And the numbers do not match.
Not wildly. Not in ways that suggest someone made an error. Just enough to tell two different stories. Finance says margins are improving. Operations says costs are rising. Both are technically correct. Both are pulling from different systems, using different definitions, measuring over different time periods. Finance thinks in quarters. Operations thinks in cycles. Nobody agreed on the vocabulary before they started counting.
The meeting that follows is always the same. Twenty minutes of presenting. Ten minutes of confusion. Fifteen minutes of debating whose numbers are right. Then someone senior says something diplomatic like: let us take this offline and align the data.
“Align the data” is one of the most expensive phrases in business. It sounds like a small task. It almost never is. Because the problem is not the data. The problem is that nobody defined what they were measuring before they started measuring it.
I have started asking a question at the beginning of every new engagement: If I asked your finance team and your operations team to independently calculate the same number, would they get the same answer?
The honest answer, almost always, is no.
This is not a technology problem. You do not solve it with a better dashboard or a new BI tool. You solve it the old-fashioned way: by getting people in a room and agreeing on definitions. What is a customer? When does a quarter start? What counts as revenue? These feel like obvious questions. They are almost never asked.
Two spreadsheets. Two truths. One conversation that nobody wants to have.
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