I’m staring directly into the tiny, unblinking green light of my webcam, and my heart is doing a rhythmic thud against my ribs that feels like a percussionist who has lost the beat. I didn’t mean to be here. I joined the meeting early to check my lighting, but I didn’t realize the host had already started the session, and now eighteen people are watching me intensely pick at a small, red blemish on my chin. It is a moment of raw, accidental vulnerability that perfectly mirrors the awkwardness of the meeting about to unfold. We are here to listen to a man we paid nearly $148,000 in consulting fees, and I already know, with a sickening certainty, that the CEO is going to tell him to shove his data into a drawer.

Dr. Aris is a senior data scientist with a pedigree that makes my own resume look like a grocery list written in crayon. He has spent the last 48 days buried in our backend, dissecting user behavior, churn rates, and market volatility with the precision of a surgeon. He clears his throat, unaware of my previous chin-picking drama, and begins to project a deck that contains exactly 248 slides of pure, unadulterated evidence. His conclusion is staggering in its clarity: if we launch the new subscription tier in the third quarter, we have an 88% chance of cannibalizing our primary revenue stream and alienating our core 108 enterprise clients.

I look at Mark, our CEO. Mark is nodding. He’s doing that ‘active listening’ thing where you tilt your head slightly and squint, making it look like you’re processing complex algorithms when you’re actually just wondering if you left the oven on or why your socks feel slightly damp. When Aris finishes, the silence in the digital room is heavy, weighing roughly 18 tons. Then, Mark speaks. ‘Fascinating, Aris. Truly rigorous work. I love the depth here. Now, I feel we should proceed with the Q3 launch anyway. My gut tells me the market is hungrier than these numbers suggest.’

The Crossword vs. The Finger-Painting

Flora B.-L. sits in the corner of my screen, her camera off, but I can practically feel her rolling her eyes. Flora is a legendary crossword puzzle constructor who occasionally consults for us on linguistic architecture, and she understands the rigidity of systems better than anyone I’ve ever met. In Flora’s world, if a word doesn’t fit the grid, the grid doesn’t work. You can’t just force ‘C-A-T’ into a four-letter space and tell the universe to deal with it. She once told me, during a particularly grueling 8-hour strategy session, that ‘a puzzle with a mistake isn’t a puzzle; it’s just a ruined piece of paper.’ Mark, however, views the company not as a crossword, but as a finger-painting. He thinks he can smudge the edges of reality whenever the colors don’t suit his mood.

This is the fundamental tension between data and power. Data is democratic, or at least it tries to be. It doesn’t care about your title or the way you look in a vest. But power? Power is deeply personal. In most organizations, the hierarchy of power will always trample the hierarchy of evidence because evidence requires submission. To follow the data is to admit that you are not the smartest person in the room. And for someone who has spent 28 years climbing to the top of the mountain, that admission feels like a long, cold fall.

The Brutal Honesty of Physics

I think back to a conversation I had with a structural engineer who worked on a project for

Sola Spaces, a company that builds those high-end, glass-enclosed sanctuaries. He was telling me about the sheer physics of tempered glass. You can have the strongest ‘feeling’ in the world that a thinner pane will look more aesthetic, but the wind load at 88 miles per hour doesn’t care about your Pinterest board. If the engineering says the glass needs to be a certain thickness, you follow the engineering, or you find yourself standing in a pile of very expensive shards.

There is a brutal honesty in materials that we lack in management. In construction, the expert’s advice is the law of gravity. In a boardroom, the expert’s advice is just one more ‘perspective’ to be weighed against the CEO’s ‘vision.’

We see this play out in the smallest ways. I remember when we spent $38,000 on a UI/UX audit. The expert, a woman who literally wrote the book on eye-tracking, told us that our ‘Submit’ button was invisible to 68% of users because of its placement. She had heat maps. She had recordings of users clicking frantically on a decorative icon, thinking it was the button. It was irrefutable. Yet, the Creative Director decided to keep it where it was because he liked the ‘negative space.’ He essentially hired an expert to tell him he was a genius, and when she told him he was making a mistake, he decided she just ‘didn’t get the brand DNA.’

Flora B.-L. once sent me a draft of a 15×15 Sunday puzzle where the theme was ‘Expert Paradox.’ Every clue for an expert ended in a synonym for ‘ignored.’ It was brilliant, and I think it stayed on my desk for 18 days before I accidentally spilled coffee on it. She understands that we are living in an era where ‘knowledge’ is a commodity, but ‘acknowledgment’ is a luxury. We are drowning in information, yet we are starving for the courage to act on it when it contradicts our desires.

Expertise Theater and the Paper Shield

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the expert in that room. I see it in Aris’s eyes as he closes his laptop. It’s the look of a man who has just screamed into a vacuum and been told his resonance was ‘very professional.’ He will go home, collect his paycheck, and probably spend 8 hours wondering why he bothered getting a PhD if he’s just going to be a glorified set-piece in a corporate play. We treat these people like props in a theatrical production of ‘Competence.’ We put them on stage to satisfy the board of directors, the investors, and our own nagging insecurities, but we never give them a speaking part that matters.

This leads to the ‘Expertise Theater’ that defines modern corporate culture. We assemble committees. We hire blue-chip firms. We commission 508-page white papers. All of this is done to create a paper trail of ‘due diligence.’ It’s a way of outsourcing the blame. If things go south, the CEO can say, ‘We consulted the best in the business.’ It’s a shield made of paper and credentials. But a shield isn’t a map. It might protect you from the fallout, but it won’t help you find the right path.

I wish we could bring that same level of physical accountability to the way we run our businesses. I wish we could treat a data point with the same respect we treat a load-bearing wall. But data is invisible, and walls are not, and humans are notoriously bad at fearing things we cannot see.

The Final Reckoning

As the meeting ends, I realize my camera is still on. I’ve been sitting here, lost in this existential spiral, while Mark is laughing about a golf game he played on the 18th hole last weekend. He looks at me and says, ‘You still there? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ I just nod and click the ‘Leave Meeting’ button. My chin is still red where I was picking at it. The blemish is still there, despite my expert knowledge that picking at it only makes it worse. I guess I’m no better than Mark. We all have our data, and we all have our desires, and the distance between them is the space where all our mistakes are made.

We are just collections of impulses and fears, wrapped in expensive suits, trying to find a justification for what we were going to do anyway. And maybe that’s the real service the expert provides: they give us someone to talk to while we wait for the inevitable consequences of our own stubbornness to arrive. I hope the glass is thick enough when it finally happens.