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Ideas and Expiration Dates Tactics, mission statements, business plans,

job descriptions, and spoilage By Trent Bellemundo

I found a candy bar in my uncle’s garage. He was in his nineties when he died last year and I was cleaning up for the estate sale. It was opened but the crumpled wrapper was refolded over a bitten part, and it looked to be from the 1930s or 40s.

Hmmm … got a question for you. Was it really a candy bar?

Let’s get really deep for a moment, okay? What is a candy bar? Does that thing I found match your answer?

We can test most things against their definitions and if they don’t conform, well then they are not what they seem. Something which seems to be fact—ain’t.

If a candy bar isn’t edible, well it isn’t candy. That thing was no more a Hershey bar today than a picture of a Hershey bar is the real thing, right?

 

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When did that thing cease being a candy bar? The moment it dropped into almost a century of debris in a garage that was already ancient when my uncle lost the thing? When it actually became unfit for consumption?

If something does not fit a functional definition … it is something else.

Everything is rooted in meaning. Facts without meaning … aren’t.

Okay, let me climb out of this TV installment of Chang Caine, Shaolin Seminarian and into the reality of an executive C-Suite. There tactical questions emerge daily. And decisions are all based upon theory. After all, until a result occurs, every action is speculative, even one so simple as releasing an apple over a water bucket. Will it splash into the water? How violently? Will the water splash over? Will the apple sink far? How vigorously will it bob? And on and on.…

Speculation involves theorizing. And theory to be useful depends upon two necessary and sufficient conditions: It must be logically consistent and it must have predictive capacity.

I once wrote for The Journal of PsychoCeramics. Psycho Ceramics is of course the study of cracked pots! Get it? It was sub-named, the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Yeah … it was an irreverent satirical magazine aimed at puncturing the egos of most sciences.

What I learned was the difference between correlation and causation. Men who were over 7’ tall had a vertical dimension that is poorly correlated with going, um, bonk-less … through many doorways. But while it seems that their heights ought to be correlated with head bonking, their tallness just didn’t predict very much. Why? Experience had taught them to duck. The men’s heights did not cause them to go, “Bonk!”

See, though it’d be logical to theorize a whole lotta’ bonkin’ goin’ on among say, NBA players, that sort of model would have little predictive capacity. The facts did not fit the definition of head bonkers, especially among older players.

The facts did not change, but the outcome did. The factual relationship implied in the theory became obsolete. The theory spoiled just like my uncle’s candy bar.

Tactical decision making is frequently fed by our experiences. When facts remain the same, we are drawn to methods with track records. The problem is that either the facts can change and something that was a candy bar no longer is one … or the correlations can change and a candy bar no longer acts as to slate an appetite.

Actually Chang Caine was the lead character in a 1970s TV show called Kung Fu that was filled with seemingly profound aphorisms that were a tad too long to cram into fortune cookies. One episode, for example, had Master Kan tell his Shaolin pupil, “What the eye sees disappears with a blink or a wandering puff of breath.”

Whoa, Heavy!

 

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And yet it reinforces my point. When it comes to the regularity of our decision making, it’s important to routinely review both the usefulness of definitions like, job descriptions, mission statements, even business plans lest they’ve gone the way of my uncle’s Hershey bar. Both ideas and the results of their application have expiration dates and their value can disappear with a blink or a wandering puff of breath. Conclusions that seem logically joined at that point come unstuck and decisions lack predictive capacity. Which results in spoilage.