Philosophy, technical purity and principles are all great. But they’re of zero value if what you’ve built doesn’t solve the right problem. Or if you’ve spent your time crafting something beautiful but beauty only accounts for 10% of the value. Reality doesn’t care whether you understood something or not. What matters is how what you’ve done performs in reality. Not in theory.
It’s easy to say, “Under these circumstances, this works perfectly.” But if those circumstances rarely occur in reality, what’s the point? If you’re not solving problems under the important circumstances, you’re risking credibility and trust.
No amount of ifs will save you from reality. There’s a great phrase: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.” If the world was a different place this would be valuable. If humans behaved differently this would work amazingly well. A perfect example is the Millenium Bridge in London. It opened in June 2000 and closed 48 hours later. The bridge swayed too much when people walked on it. “The problem is the way people walk”. It took 18 months to correct the design. If only people didn’t walk the way they walk.
In business, a similar thing happens when companies obscure the full picture by only reporting their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). In other words, this is how the company did if you ignore some really important realities about cashflow, debt burden, capital expenditure, one-time costs and revenue. “But operationally we’re profitable!” Great! But what about the rest?
Equally, you’ve probably heard companies say, “This is how we performed without that messy COVID thing.” But in reality, those factors do matter. COVID did happen. Cashflow, crippling debt piles and large capital expenditures can kill a company. Steinhoff International (South Africa, 2017), Carrillion (UK, 2018), Thomas Cook Group (UK, 2019) and Hertz Global Holdings (USA, 2020) all collapsed with large debt burdens and cashflow issues, despite reporting good EBITDA figures. A hard lesson in the fact that reality doesn’t care about your feelings or what you want the world to believe.
So, what does that mean for us in our work? It means we demonstrate early and often. It means we don’t assume we know it all and check and validate our understanding of what’s needed.
It means we uncover the hard truths, never shying away from them to avoid upsetting the client. We’ve lost count of how many projects have started with, “If we can predict this thing, we’ll make money” or, “If we push that task on to customers, we’ll reduce our operational costs”. Yes, of course. In theory. But if the real-life circumstances don’t support the solution (we can’t predict that thing with meaningful accuracy, customers don’t want to do that task), it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
It’s why we push to fail fast and cheap. It’s why we recognise that what systems are designed to do, what they actually do and what people believe they do are different things. It’s why we explain for people who neither understand nor care.
And it’s why we don’t just take feedback on the chin, we invite it in. It’s our connection to reality. It’s the key to making things better.