Counted at the bottom

A tailor in Mansoura can tell you, without looking anything up, which customers will put on weight before the wedding, which will ask for the trousers shortened twice, and which cloth will shine at the knee by winter. Nobody has ever asked him for a figure.

Above bare numbers sits a ladder, each step harder to reach than the one below. At the bottom, the tallies: how many suits, how many metres, how many returns. One step up, those tallies arranged so they mean something. Then the practical know-how of what to do about it. Then a grasp of why it happens at all. And at the top, the judgement to tell what matters from what can be left alone.

The tailor lives near the top. His sense of people and cloth was earned over decades, and he applies it in a sentence.

Look at where attention goes in most places, though. The effort, the money and nearly all the arguing happen on the bottom step. We count footfall, clicks and minutes. We buy more ways to count them. We debate whether the count was right. The higher steps, where a decision actually improves, get a fraction of the attention, partly because they are hard to put on a screen and partly because they cannot be bought, only grown.

It is an understandable habit. Counting feels like rigour. Judgement feels like opinion, and opinion is easy to dismiss when there are numbers on the table.

But a business with perfect tallies and no judgement is precise about the wrong things. The tailor keeps very few tallies and makes almost no wrong suits.

I suspect we have the ladder upside down, spending most where it helps least.