Pick a simple question about your own business. Genuinely simple. *What’s the status of the Henderson deal?* Now watch what answering it actually costs.
You ask the account executive, who gives you a fragment, a caveat, and a referral: *mostly closed, I think legal’s reviewing, but check with Dana.* Dana has a different fragment: *contract’s back, but there was a scope question — that’s really Marcus’s.* Marcus has the scope answer and a fresh concern about implementation dates, which only Priya knows. Priya knows, but her answer contradicts something the AE said, so now you’re circling back.
Five conversations. Two days. And what you finally hold is not *the* answer — it’s an artisanal reconstruction, hand-assembled from fragments, each one filtered through a person’s memory, mood, and sense of what you wanted to hear.
You have just performed a database join, manually, using humans as tables. There’s no dashboard for the Henderson deal. There’s a scavenger hunt.
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Price this honestly, because nobody ever does.
**Latency:** the answer took two days to assemble, so every decision downstream of it ran two days late — or ran early, on the fragment version. **Distortion:** every hop added interpretation; you played telephone with operational reality and then made a commitment based on the final whisper. **The interruption tax:** five people got context-switched out of their actual work to serve as lookup tables — the absorbers absorbing again, one query at a time.
And the one nobody says out loud: **access by social capital.** *You* can ask five people — you’re the founder, or the VP; people answer you promptly and fully. The junior AE who needs the same information cannot. She doesn’t have standing to interrupt Marcus. So she operates on less truth than you do, makes worse-informed decisions than you would, and gets reviewed as if she had the same access all along. In an oral-tradition company, information is distributed by hierarchy and charisma, not by need. The people closest to the customer frequently know the least about the company they represent.
Then the final insult: the answer *expires on delivery.* Nothing was captured. No artifact exists. Ask the same question next week and you pay the full price again — five people, two days, fresh assembly. Your company pays retail, per query, for knowledge it already owns.
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If the only way to know what’s happening is to ask five people, you don’t have alignment. You have oral tradition — and I said in Chapter 9 that I mean that respectfully, as a description of a real system with real warmth.
But let me be equally respectful and equally clear about its limits: oral tradition is a charming feature of close-knit communities. It is not a revenue operations strategy. A company whose operational facts must be reassembled by hand, per question, per asker, at conversation speed, has chosen — by never choosing otherwise — to make *knowing things* the most expensive activity in the building.
And expensive knowing produces exactly the behavior you’d predict: people stop asking. They run on assumptions, stale fragments, and vibes, not because they’re careless but because the truth has a two-day lead time and the deadline is today. Chapter 7 called this the questions you stop asking. Here’s where the not-asking gets manufactured — one exhausting scavenger hunt at a time.
Knowing should be cheap. That’s the whole ask. In most companies it’s artisanal — every answer handmade, every fact bespoke.
What happens when you industrialize it? Final section of the misdiagnosis story. It’s the good news, and it will still make some people uncomfortable.