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 to measure, 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 test applications for ourselves (delivered internally) to delivering finished products to our external customers. And software wasn’t even the company’s main business. We were just a necessary evil. 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 collecting the data didn’t know the answer. 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 the final tally could only be a clumsy approximation of the truth. (“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 that my answer was “too high” or “too low.” But if my number was “just right,” I didn’t think they’d say a thing. (Of course they also wouldn’t say anything 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.” Now if the minions complained about my answer, I could point to 17 things that 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 replied with “17” again, and still the minions did not reply. Every month for the next year and a half, I reported “17 capabilities delivered,” and I never heard a thing. I don’t believe the minions ever noticed that my answers were always the same. Then the minions abruptly stopped asking for numbers. They didn’t give us an explanation. They just stopped. All that expended energy simply vanished into the oxygen-poor heights of the bureaucracy.

And that’s the Rule of 17: Don’t get deeply invested in someone else’s sloppy data collection. While everyone around you is struggling to find the “correct” interpretation of a vague request, use that time to do something nice for yourself. Grab a clipboard and walk briskly (the universal sign of productivity) as you leave the building. Have lunch. Take a walk. Give blood. Do something fun. Then go back to the office and make up a reasonable number. Don’t explain it. Don’t ask questions. Just turn in the number. Act like you know what you’re doing. And you do know what you’re doing–you’re putting the right amount of effort into a fundamentally meaningless request. It may feel like slacking, but the people who made the request were slacking even harder. If the numbers truly mattered, they would have given you clear instructions.