Someone I follow on Bluesky recently posted an absurd demand from her HR department. It was a sharp reminder of the madness I experienced in my own career. One event that still stands out after twenty years was the demand that we begin reporting our monthly number of “capabilities delivered.”

“Capability delivered” sounds like a reasonable thing, but I was in a group of developers writing small-to-medium software tools. Those two vague little words could describe anything we did, from creating tiny spreadsheets and test applications for ourselves to delivering finished products to external customers. To make it worse, there was no corporate tracking of software development or deliveries, so there was no existing bureaucratic pigeonhole for the requested data. Foolish mortal that I was, I asked for clarification. What counts as a capability? What counts as delivery? If I send the same software to twenty people, is that one capability delivered or twenty capabilities delivered? My request was rebuffed, and it wasn’t hard to guess why: The people I asked didn’t know either. Our Big Boss had shouted, “Minions, fetch me the monthly number of capabilities delivered!” and they had scrambled to obey without question. From that, I drew three conclusions:

1. Everyone would interpret “capability delivered” differently, so when the numbers were added up, the result be a vague and fuzzy approximation. (“Garbage In Garbage Out” for those who know the idiom.)
2. This was Political Theater, not Management Science.
3. The minions had unwittingly dared me to conduct an experiment.

I decided to report a test number and see what happened. If the minions had an unspoken definition of “capability delivered,” they might complain if they thought my answer was “too high” or “too low.” But if my number was somehow acceptable, I didn’t think they’d respond. (Of course they also wouldn’t respond if they simply didn’t care. Social experiments of this sort are rarely perfect.)

I needed a believable test number, so I chose 17. It’s odd. It’s prime. And for some reason, it doesn’t sound made-up. But I didn’t just throw that number at the minions and call it a day. I reviewed my monthly work log and identified 17 things that met a fairly broad definition of “capability delivered.” That gave me a defensible position. If the minions complained about my answer, I could point to 17 things I had actually done and say “I thought that’s what you meant.” I sent in my answer and heard nothing. The next month, I did the same thing. And the next.

For the next year and a half, I reported the same number every month. Not only did the minions accept my numbers without question, they never asked why they were always the same. In fact, I never heard anything back from anyone. Then the minions abruptly stopped collecting numbers. No explanation. They just stopped.

And that’s the Rule of 17: Don’t invest yourself in someone else’s sloppy data collection. While everyone around you is sweating bullets as they struggle to interpret some vague request from people who don’t know what they’re doing, remember to use wisely the limited seconds of your life. Grab a clipboard and walk briskly out of the office. (Clipboards and haste make you look productive.) Go out to lunch. Take a walk. Give blood. Do something fun. Then make up a reasonable number and report it like you know what you’re doing. And you do know what you’re doing–you’re putting the right amount of work into a fundamentally meaningless request. It may feel like slacking, but the people who made the request were slacking even harder. Otherwise they would have given you clear instructions.