When you run into a gap in your business, your mind fills it with a reasonable explanation before you notice there was a gap. According to the source, that reasonableness is the chief offender, and it is why people end up holding an explanation and never reach the cause.
In this booklet, a cause is the thing that brings the numbers back once you correct it. A mere explanation can be true, reasonable and convincing, and still open no door. The mechanism that produces these explanations fires hardest exactly when the situation is serious.
The mind fills holes on its own
The source puts it bluntly: “Being reasonable” is the chief offender.
It then explains the mechanism. People invent the missing link in a chain of events, and never see that the link is absent. A false datum is imagined to exist because the sequence is wrong or a step has dropped out.
That is what happens in the second you meet a gap. The mind cannot stand a hole, so it closes it, and once it is closed there is nothing to investigate. Reasonableness works fast, before you have had a chance to notice, which is why it is so hard to catch.
Say an owner sees an employee leave early and assumes straight away that there is an arrangement. There was none, and the man left early for eight weeks running.
Or an owner sees an invoice she does not recognise and assumes it is from last year. It was a duplicate.
Or an installer finds a tool missing and assumes he lent it out. It had been stolen two months earlier.
The pig in the parlor
The source gives this an image that is hard to forget. Reasonable people accept things that are out of place with amazing tranquility, because they imagine a connecting link or assume they simply do not know the ideal scene. The ideal scene is the picture of how things are supposed to look.
Then it adds a line about a pig in a parlor: a reasonable person accepts it by imagining there must be a good reason. According to the source, that person leaves the pig where it is and revises his own ideal scene.
The last part is the point. The anomaly stays, and the standard drops to meet it. Two months later it is no longer obvious to anyone that things once looked different. That explains why a first-time visitor to your business instantly notices things you no longer see at all.
Imagine an owner who got used to the phone ringing unanswered whenever he is busy. After a year nobody counts it as a problem. It is just how the business works.
Or a studio owner who got used to every project running two weeks over, until she began promising clients two extra weeks up front. Only when she asked a new employee what looked strange did she hear that the studio had no approval stage at all, so the overrun was built into the process.
The tiger at lunch
The strongest example of reasonableness in the source is a short story from a zoo. A group stopped in front of a tiger's cage, found it empty, and was disappointed. The writer of the source stood there and told them the tiger was out to lunch. They passed it along to the people at the edge of the group, everyone cheered up, accepted the empty cage and went off happy.
Not one of them asked what lunch, or who he was, or laughed at the joke. And it was sunset.
Three questions would have been enough, and none was asked, because the explanation arrived first. Nothing hard was required. Noticing the time of day would have been enough.
Suppose an owner asks why an order is late and hears that it is in the warehouse. She does not ask which warehouse. The order was never placed at all.
Or a studio owner asks why a client has not signed and hears that he is overseas. The client was in the country and had signed with a competitor. From the day she started always asking a second question, half the explanations she received did not survive it.
According to the booklet, the first explanation you hear is the end of the conversation, which is why it cannot be treated as information.
Why it looks like good judgment
In the booklet's illness example from the first chapter, a drop in the numbers was explained by people being sick. The source calls that a mere explanation, and adds that it was very reasonable and solved nothing.
“Very reasonable” is exactly the dangerous part. A person who gave an unreasonable explanation would be doubted at once. Good explanations pass every check except one: they open no door.
Take an owner who blamed a quarterly drop on an employee leaving. That sounded entirely reasonable, yet the drop had begun two months before the employee's last day.
Or an owner who explained a slow week by the rain. When she checked three years back, she found her bookings actually rose in rainy weeks.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: a second question, and the pig. After them comes a self-check. From there the booklet moves on to the two pictures without which there is nothing to find a cause from.
The next explanation you hear will probably be reasonable. That is exactly why it deserves one more moment of your attention.