Some of It Is Worth Keeping. Know Which.

Anthony builds a slide every quarter for the board deck.

It takes a day and a half, because the numbers live in four places and two of them disagree until somebody reconciles them. He has built it eighteen times.

The board has seen it three times. The deck runs long, the meeting stops somewhere around slide nine, and the rest goes out as a read-ahead nobody references.

In four and a half years, not one person has asked a question about it.

He Did the Right Thing

He asked.

Not in the meeting. He found the person who would know, and asked what the slide was for and who wanted it. This is the whole method and he ran it properly.

The answer came back immediately, and it was not a shrug.

The slide exists so the same view is available over time, consistently prepared, in case somebody outside the company ever needs to look at the history. It was set up that way deliberately by the person who built the deck before him. There is a reason and it is a real one.

And He Still Cannot Tell

This is where it stops looking like the usual version of this problem.

Nobody in that building can tell Anthony whether that somebody will ever exist. Not the person who gave him the answer. Not the finance team. Not the person who set it up, who is describing an intention rather than a schedule.

The slide is not waste. It is an option, and options are legitimate things to carry.

It is also an option nobody has ever priced.

The Test Does Not Apply Here

You cannot stop producing a board slide for thirty days and see who notices.

That works on a weekly pack because the cost of being wrong is a week. On a board deck the cost of being wrong is discovering, in the room, that the one quarter you skipped was the quarter somebody wanted it.

So the method that found this thing cannot finish it. That is not a failure of the method. It is what happens when an artifact sits somewhere the consequences are asymmetric.

Asking Again Gets the Same Answer

The obvious move is to raise it every year until somebody decides.

That does not work, and the reason matters. The answer is attached to a person. Ask them again in twelve months and you are not asking a question, you are asking them to contradict something they already told you. People do not do that, and asking repeatedly turns an inquiry into a campaign.

The answer only becomes reviewable when the person changes. A new CFO inherits the deck and no position on it. A new board member arrives with no history of having seen the slide three times. An acquisition, a restructure, a change of owner, and the audience for that consistent view is a different audience, which is the one fact the original reason depended on.

None of that is on a schedule.

In the Meantime, Make It Cheaper

The wait could be years. There is no reason to spend them building it the same way.

Almost none of the day and a half is the slide. It is the four places the numbers live and the two that disagree until somebody reconciles them by hand, every quarter, finding the same kinds of discrepancy.

That is a reconciliation problem and it has a real answer. Pull the four sources once, put the tie-out in a script that runs itself, and the slide becomes an hour of formatting on numbers that are already right.

Writing that script used to be a project somebody had to get funded. It is now an afternoon with an assistant, provided the person who understands the reconciliation is the one checking what comes out. The rule the numbers are tied out against is a judgment somebody made, and no tool can tell you whether it is still the right rule.

Six days a year becomes one.

You Cannot Stop It and You Cannot Hand It On

So look at what Anthony is holding.

He cannot stop it, and the test that would prove it unnecessary cannot be run in a room where being wrong is that expensive. He cannot reliably wait it out either, because nothing tells him when the audience will change.

And having made it cheap, he cannot count on the cost to force the issue. An hour a year is not a thing anybody reviews. He has removed the only mechanism that was ever going to surface it.

Which leaves the one move he has not made.

Do Not Be the Person the Next One Cannot Find

Every one of these arrives the same way. A standing approval with a department routing through it and nobody left who set the number. A recurring meeting with nine people who inherited it. A weekly pack whose only real test was an accident nobody recognized.

In every case somebody handed over the work and not the reason.

Anthony is four years into a slide he did not create, and at some point he hands it to whoever sits in his chair next. Pass on a script and a calendar reminder and he becomes the person that one cannot find.

So he writes it down. Beside the file, three lines. What this is for. Who set it up and when. What would make it stop.

Thirty seconds, once. It does not end the slide, price it, or get anybody's attention. It means the next person starts where Anthony finished instead of where Anthony started, and the reason survives as long as the artifact does.

Four Pieces Looking for a Reason

Most of the time you go looking for the reason and find it expired, or that its author left, or that nobody can name who asked.

This one has a reason. It is sound, it was set deliberately, and it may still be right.

Some of what you are carrying is genuinely worth carrying.

It is fine to ask what it is worth. It is not fine to continue in silence, to quietly cease production, or to stop caring which one you are doing.

-BZ