The Tuesday Ritual

“But the warehouse doesn’t account for the 19% churn we saw in Q3,” Marcus says, his thumb hovering over the ‘next’ button like it’s a detonator. The blue light from the projector is hitting him right in the left eye, making him squint in a way that looks more aggressive than he probably intends. Or maybe he does intend it. We’ve been in this conference room for 49 minutes, and the air conditioning is struggling to keep the temperature at 69 degrees, but the tension is doing a fine job of heating things up.

This is the ritual. We do this every Tuesday. We have spent roughly $59,999 this year on ‘data harmonization’ tools, yet here we are, weaponizing different versions of the same reality against each other. Sarah trusts her dashboard because her bonus depends on it. Marcus trusts the data warehouse because it’s the only thing that justifies his team’s skepticism. Both claim to be looking at the ‘Single Source of Truth,’ yet they are speaking two different languages using the same alphabet.

The Space Between

I’m sitting in the corner, ostensibly here to discuss the branding for the new internal portal, but mostly I’m just watching the kerning on Sarah’s slides. As a typeface designer, my brain is hardwired to look for the gaps between things. If the space between an ‘r’ and an ‘n’ is too tight, it looks like an ‘m’. The ‘truth’ of the word changes based on the physical distance between the parts. Data is the same way. You can call it a single source all you want, but if the distance between the input and the interpretation is too wide, the truth just dissolves into whatever shape you want it to take.

We’ve been sold this myth for years-the idea that if we just find the right platform, the right Salesforce integration, the right SharePoint architecture, or the perfect Google Sheet, all our organizational friction will vanish. And that contract is currently being shredded by 9 different people in this room.

The Political Claim

“When Sarah says her dashboard is the truth, she’s not making a technical claim; she’s making a political one. She’s saying, ‘This is the narrative that protects my department.’ When Marcus counters it, he’s not trying to find accuracy; he’s trying to reclaim power.”

In my own work, designing a typeface like ‘Garamond-9’ (a personal project I’ve been obsessing over for 29 weeks), there is no ‘single source’ for what a perfect ‘a’ looks like. I have to lie to the eye to make the ‘truth’ of the letterform feel right. I have to adjust the weight, tweak the counters, and sometimes intentionally break the symmetry just so it doesn’t look broken. Organizations are terrified of that kind of nuance. They want the dashboard to be the final word so they don’t have to do the hard work of talking to each other.

But the machine is only as honest as the person who set the filters. And in this company, the filters are set to ‘Survival.’

The Migration Failure

I remember a project I did for a mid-sized firm about 9 years ago. They had 19 different project management tools. It was chaos. They hired a consultant who told them they needed to migrate everything into one massive, centralized system. They spent 9 months and a few hundred thousand dollars doing it. On the day of the launch, everyone cheered. Six weeks later, I went back to visit. The big system was pristine and empty. Why? Because the sales team had quietly moved back to their private Excel sheets, and the designers were using a physical whiteboard in a room where the cameras couldn’t see them.

This is where the real work happens-in the local, the private, and the unmonitored. We’ve become so obsessed with the cloud as the ultimate arbiter of reality that we’ve forgotten that truth is often something you build on your own machine, in your own time.

Fighting for the Eye

I once spent 39 hours trying to fix a ‘truth’ error in a font file. The software insisted that two points were perfectly aligned, but to my eye, they looked slanted. The math said 0, but the reality said -1. I had to ignore the ‘source of truth’ (the software’s internal coordinate system) to fix the ‘source of trust’ (the user’s visual experience). If I hadn’t, the font would have been technically perfect and practically useless.

Most companies are currently technically perfect and practically useless. They have the reports. They have the KPIs. But they can’t make a decision to save their lives because nobody believes the numbers they’re looking at. They’ve built a cathedral of data on a foundation of sand.

When we force everyone into one system, we flatten the perspective. We lose the texture of the different departments. We lose the ‘local truth’ that tells us Sarah is optimistic because she’s seeing the top of the funnel, and Marcus is cynical because he’s seeing the bottom of the bucket. Both are ‘true.’ Neither is ‘The Truth.’

The Dignity of Mess

I’m thinking about my own desk. It’s a mess. I have 9 different notebooks, 29 half-used pens, and a stack of printed proofs. To an outsider, there is no single source of truth on my desk. But I know exactly where everything is. I trust my mess. If someone came in and ‘harmonized’ my desk into a single, clean drawer, I wouldn’t be able to work for a month.

As the meeting finally winds down, Sarah closes her laptop with a satisfying click. The ‘Single Source of Truth’ remains unresolved, but the action items have been assigned anyway. We’re going to form a task force to ‘reconcile the discrepancies.’ It will take 9 weeks and cost another $29,000 in billable hours.

The Sense of Balance

I’m going back to my studio to work on the letter ‘s’. It’s the hardest letter to get right because it’s all curves and no straight lines. There’s no center to it. You have to balance the top and the bottom by feel. You have to trust the flow, not the grid.

I walk out of the room, past the 99-inch screen in the lobby that is currently displaying the stock price-another ‘truth’ that changes every 9 seconds. I wonder if anyone actually believes it, or if we’re all just participating in the same collective hallucination because it’s easier than admitting we’re just making it up as we go along.