We spend the first week of every engagement arguing about definitions.

In almost every discovery, finance and sales turn out to mean different things by the same word. Open pipeline. Stalled quote. Active dealer. Dormant account. Both departments are reporting honestly. Both numbers appear in the same board pack. Nobody has noticed because the two reports are never read side by side.

You cannot improve a metric that two departments compute differently, because every improvement will be disputed by whoever is not benefiting from the way it was measured. So the argument happens either at the start, in a room, for a week, or at the end, in front of the board, for a quarter.

What a settled definition contains

• The computation, in enough detail that two people working separately get the same answer.
• The exclusions, which are where the disagreements actually live.
• A named owner who accepts the number as theirs.
• A version, because when it changes it is a release rather than an edit.

The exclusions are the whole game. In one engagement the difference between two reported figures for scheme cost came down entirely to whether centrally won project volume that was merely billed through a dealer counted as dealer volume. Two meetings to settle. Worth more than everything else in the model.

We write definitions into the system as versioned objects rather than into a document that gets stale. When someone changes what open pipeline excludes, every number computed under the old definition remains traceable to it. That is the only way a management question asked twice returns the same answer twice.