When objective truth becomes expensive wallpaper for subjective fear.
The projector hums a low, irritant G-flat as the 41st slide clicks into place, bathing the room in a clinical blue light that makes everyone’s coffee look like stagnant swamp water. I am sitting in the back, my fingers still tingling from the micro-adjustments I made to a vintage tourbillion movement earlier this morning, and I’m watching a Director of Growth explain a pivot. He has data. He has 111 data points per slide. He has correlations that look like shimmering constellations of revenue. And yet, the air in the room is stale with a peculiar kind of dishonesty. We are all waiting for the “but.”
It comes from the head of the table. The CEO, a man who prides himself on his decisive nature, leans back until his leather chair groans in a pitch that matches the projector. He hasn’t looked at the charts in 21 minutes. He’s been looking at the window, or perhaps at his own reflection in the mahogany table. “This is all great,” he says, and you can hear the internal machinery of the company grinding to a halt. “But my gut tells me we should go the other way. We’re going with the legacy play.”
The Performance of Data
In that moment, the 41 slides become nothing more than expensive wallpaper. They were never meant to guide; they were meant to perform. It is a modern corporate paradox that we invest 1,001 hours into collecting objective truths only to allow a single subjective human emotion to overrule it at the finish line. It reveals that data, in the hands of the insecure, is used as theater, not as a compass.
41
Slides Presented
1 Gut Decision
I feel a sharp, localized pain at the top of my palate-a brain freeze from a peppermint swirl ice cream I ate too quickly during the break-and it feels remarkably like the cognitive dissonance currently vibrating through the room.
The Watchmaker’s Trust: Precision vs. Ego
In my world, as someone who assembles watch movements, precision is not a suggestion. If a gear is off by 0.001 millimeters, the watch doesn’t just run slow; it eventually eats itself. The friction builds, the heat distorts the metal, and the whole system fails. There is no “gut feeling” in a mechanical escapement. You either have the torque right, or you have a pile of useless gold and steel.
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The Cost of Ego
I remember a specific mistake I made early in my career, sitting at my bench with a caliber 3131 movement. I was tired, and I ignored the reading on my digital caliper because I “felt” the bridge plate was seated correctly. I was wrong. That 1 specific instance of ego cost me 11 hours of work and a $151 replacement part. I learned then that trust isn’t something you feel; it’s something you verify.
But in a boardroom, the stakes are hidden behind layers of social capital and quarterly buffers. When a leader says “my gut,” what they are really saying is “I am afraid of what this data implies about my previous decisions.” We have reached a saturation point where we have so much information that we’ve developed a collective paralysis. We look at a dashboard and see 51 different KPIs, and because we don’t know which one to trust, we trust none of them. This lack of trust is the actual rot at the center of the “data-driven” movement. It isn’t a lack of numbers; it’s the lack of a narrative that is robust enough to survive the CEO’s intuition.
Most organizations are currently operating in a state of high-fidelity blindness. They have the best sensors in the world, but they refuse to believe the readings if the readings suggest they should turn the wheel. It’s like a pilot looking at an altimeter that says they are 11 feet from the ground and deciding to climb based on how the air feels against the wings. It is a recipe for a very expensive crater.
Altimeter Reading
11 FT
Objective Truth
VS
Wing Feel
Climb
Subjective Bias
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We are not making decisions; we are performing an autopsy on a body that hasn’t even died yet.
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The problem is compounded by the fact that much of the data being presented is actually just noise. It’s crowdsourced from flawed systems or pulled from silos that don’t speak to each other. When you give a leader garbage, even if it’s gold-plated garbage, you can’t blame them for reverting to their own biases. To fix the decision-making process, you have to provide intelligence that carries the weight of reality. You need a system where the data is so refined and so inherently trustworthy that ignoring it feels as reckless as jumping out of a plane without checking for a parachute. This is where a platform like factor software changes the conversation. By utilizing AI and crowdsourced intelligence that is designed for actual utility rather than just visual fluff, it addresses the fundamental trust gap. It moves the data from the realm of “suggestion” to the realm of “fact,” providing the kind of precision that I demand at my watchmaker’s bench.
81%
Time Wasted in Meetings
Meeting time spent looking at data we have no intention of acting upon.
When the information is that clear, the “gut” has nowhere to hide. You can no longer pretend that your intuition is a better guide than a global network of verified intelligence. It forces a level of accountability that most corporate cultures aren’t ready for, which is exactly why they should be forced into it. We spend 81 percent of our meetings looking at things we have no intention of acting upon. If we were to trim that down to the 1 percent of data that actually mattered, the meetings would be shorter, but the impact would be exponentially higher.
The Jewels of Excess
I think back to the 21 jewels inside a high-end movement. Each one is there for a specific reason-to reduce friction at a specific point of contact. If you added a 22nd jewel just for the sake of having “more,” you’d ruin the balance. Data is the same. We are currently stuffing our business movements with 101 extra jewels that serve no purpose other than to make the spec sheet look impressive. We are obsessed with the volume of our dashboards when we should be obsessed with the friction they are supposed to be removing.
📊
101 Extra Jewels
Data volume obsession.
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Increased Friction
System failure imminent.
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Humility Needed
Technology evolved, humility hasn’t.
There is a certain irony in the fact that we call ourselves “modern” while still relying on the same primitive instincts that our ancestors used to decide which bush had the least poisonous berries. Our technology has evolved, but our humility has not. We still want to be the hero of the story, the visionary who saw what the machines could not. But the reality is that the visionary is usually just someone who got lucky once and spent the rest of their career trying to replicate that luck while ignoring the 31 warnings that they were about to fail.
Shifting the Lead Role
If we want to actually be data-driven, we have to stop treating data as a supporting character in our own personal dramas. We have to treat it as the lead. This requires a cultural shift where the most junior analyst in the room can tell the CEO they are wrong because the data says so, and the CEO actually listens. It requires a world where the “gut” is relegated to deciding what’s for lunch, while the strategy is dictated by the most accurate, verified intelligence available.
✓
Truth
Quiet & Small
I’ve spent 11 years looking through a loupe, seeing the world in increments of microns. I know that truth is small, quiet, and often inconvenient. It doesn’t shout like a CEO, and it doesn’t have a 41-slide presentation. It just sits there, waiting to be acknowledged. If you ignore it, the gears will eventually seize. The watch will stop. The company will fold. And no amount of “gut feeling” will be able to wind it back up again.
