The comfortable explanation

Give a business a problem and it'll hand you an explanation almost before you've finished describing it. Someone in the room always has one ready.

It fits the facts everyone happens to remember, it sounds about right, and a good share of the time it is flat wrong. The speed and the rightness have nothing to do with each other. The first explanation that fits is just the one that was nearest to hand.

One of my markets had its weekly sales drop, and not by a little, and the team already knew why. A storm had come through. Half the city had been shut in for two days, the riders couldn't move, the orders weren't there. You can't really argue with that, because it's true. There had been a storm.

We went and looked anyway, mostly out of habit. The numbers didn't agree. The drop hadn't started on the Saturday when the weather hit; it had started on the Tuesday before, and not as a slide but as a step, the way a number moves when something switches off rather than when something wears down. Tuesday was a clear sky. So we kept pulling at it, and there it was. On the Monday night, in a routine system update, a promotion that had been running for months had quietly dropped out, and nobody had noticed, because nobody was looking there. They were looking at the weather. The storm was real. It had also cost us nothing. What had cost us was a setting that took an afternoon to put back.

The interesting part was never the missing promotion. It was how much everyone, me included, had wanted the storm to be the answer. A storm is a wonderful explanation, and part of why it works so well is that it belongs to no one. An act of God. Nobody in that meeting had to feel anything worse than mildly unlucky. A promotion falling out of the system belongs to somebody, or at least to some process with a person's name loosely attached, and the moment you arrive there the conversation stops being commiseration. Rooms are very good, without anyone deciding to be, at preferring the first sort of explanation to the second.

This gets stronger the bigger the business, which is the part I find genuinely interesting. In a two-person shop the comfortable explanation and the awkward one land on the same two people, so there's nowhere to hide in choosing the comfortable one. Add a few hundred people and a few layers, and almost every honest explanation implicates somebody, which means almost every honest explanation has someone with a quiet reason to prefer a different one. Nobody conspires. The place just develops a gentle, permanent lean towards the version where the cause is external, last quarter was last quarter, and everyone currently in the room is fine. Comfortable explanations are a kind of organisational sediment. They settle wherever no one has a reason to disturb them, and they set hard.

The useful response to all this is dull, which is usually a sign it's worth something. We'd have spent the next fortnight bracing for weather we could do nothing about. The actual problem had been sitting in a settings page since the Monday, waiting for anyone to look.

The explanation that asks nothing of anyone in the room is the one to check first.