Correctly different
How many definitions of revenue exist in an org? Try counting the members in the leadership team.
A c-suite exec once demanded I build a single source of truth. We already had one. It just wasn't the number they liked. So less a single source and more like their source.
A personal tenet I still hold onto is optimizing for the greater good of the org. Except that's just my single source of truth - one others may not agree with. I've been doing the same thing the execs were, wanting my definition to be the truth.
The tension was never about numbers. It's individual goals competing with org goals. Every definition is a goal wearing a number. Multiple goals mean multiple definitions are the rule, not the exception.
A metric isn't a persistent particle. It's more like a wave function, where the right definition depends on who's observing, and when.
Take orders for example. I'll just use two variants (there's plenty more, but two is enough):
- Order Created Date - when an order-id is generated after a customer places an order. Marketing and product live here.
- Order Confirmed Date - when Stripe confirms payment was captured. Finance and accounting live here.
99% of the time the counts match. It's when it matters that they don't. And in those moments, no one's arguing about definitions or trying to be proven right. They just need the numbers acknowledged as correctly different.
Yes - external reporting has to land on one canonical number. That's reporting. This isn't about reporting.
This is what the semantic-layer and context-engineering conversations conveniently gloss over. They've been lured in by the siren's song of single source and are trying to engineer the one true definition.
Organizations have been living with multiple definitions for decades. Individuals will scaffold around their worldview and do what makes the most rational sense.
The job isn't picking the right number. It's holding all of them at once. Coexistence is the skill. Awareness is the job. And it's never finished.