Big numbers are hiding places

A $31.4M problem sounds specific. It is not. It is an average wearing a costume. The useful work was decomposition: splitting one scary number into branches until each branch had an owner, a mechanism, and a fix someone could start on Monday. The lesson generalizes. When a metric feels unactionable, it is usually not measured wrong. It is aggregated wrong. Keep dividing until the number becomes somebody's job. When our bridge finally closed, 85.9 percent of the loss sat in one branch: visit volume.