Insight

Value Is a Fact About Them

Every organization I have worked in could tell me precisely what it had delivered last quarter. Almost none could tell me what any of it changed.

That is not carelessness. It is the predictable result of one asymmetry: delivery is a fact about you, and value is a fact about them.

Delivery has dates, owners, a definition of done, and a satisfying moment when something moves to the right on a board. Every part of it is observable from inside the building, by people who are already in the room. Value has none of those properties. It arrives late, refuses to attach itself cleanly to any one team’s effort, and can only be confirmed by asking someone who does not work for you.

Given a measurement you can produce on Thursday and one you cannot, the week wins. It wins in every organization, every time, and nobody decides that it should.

So the question of whether the work was worth doing gets answered once — at funding, in the single moment when no evidence exists yet — and then quietly never again. By the time evidence exists, the decision is a year old and reopening it would embarrass someone.

What follows is an organization that can describe its output in detail and its contribution not at all. It is not failing. It looks, from every internal angle, like it is succeeding.

The correction is unglamorous and it is not a better dashboard. It is keeping one channel open to a person on the other end — close enough, and often enough, that a number can be contradicted by something a human being actually said. That channel is cheap to maintain and always the first thing cut when the quarter tightens, which tells you how the organization really ranks the two facts.