Estimate That!

The other day, I was at the store and the guy at the counter rang up the sale. An awkward $10.18 Meaning, I was going to haul back a few dollar bills and 82 cents in jingling, heavy change. Determined to forestall an increase in the metal payload in my pockets, I fished around my pockets and to my delight, I found two dimes. With a triumphant smirk, I put the two dimes on the sales counter along with a $20 bill. And waited and waited, as the poor guy first looked at his left hand holding the twenty dollar bill and then the right holding two dimes and finally at the cash register display that showed $10.18. Finally at peace, wearing a smile, he gave me back the two dimes, rang the sale for a $20 payment and gave me nine dollar bills and shot the small change of 82 cents through the coin chute.


Other than suffering the inconvenience I had hoped to avoid with my twenty cent gambit, the deeper regret that surfaces is that we are not teaching our children to estimate and carry and manipulate numbers in their heads. We are not teaching our children how to approximate and come up with ballpark numbers that are often close but not exact. Modern technology has reduced the problem of calculation to the silicon chip and a few deft finger strokes and the illusion of perfect knowledge and computation - in much the same way that the Internet has dumbed down the amount of knowledge we need to carry in our heads because the facts are simply an iPad or smart phone away - or the way in which managers blindly believe in the numbers on a spreadsheet without an inkling or approximation of what the numbers should be - or how we remember friends' telephone number by their auto-dialing prefix on our smart phones.

Nowhere is this blind faith more evident than the executive dashboard - a panoply of software display "gauges" that tells the executive that all her projects are in good health - as the green colors clearly showed. Or the "analytics" that are now freely available to the executive who wants to serve himself with the conclusions and does not want to bother himself with the supporting data.

The conventional management wisdom "to measure is to manage" and its logical extension "to measure accurately is to manage effectively" must give way, in a constantly changing world where measurements are both impossible to make and where accuracy in a single dimension has no meaning in the context of many dimensions, to the maxim "To estimate well is to assess, and to assess is to understand where to lead". Ballpark knowledge is often just enough for effective leadership.

Estimation is like an exoskeleton for the mind - just as an exoskeleton allows a human being to carry superhuman loads, or walk superhuman distances, estimation and approximation stretches the ability of the mind to fathom the vast deep of the unknown. Estimation and approximation allows the thinker to draw the sketches of hypothesis as patterns that come from thought and observation.