To find the cause of a problem in your business, you start by looking for outpoints: pieces of data that are offered as true and do not fit when you compare them. According to the source there are eleven categories of them, and the strongest is something that is missing, because a missing thing draws no attention to itself.
In this booklet, a cause is the thing that brings the numbers back once you correct it. Outpoints are what lead to it, so it helps to understand what they are before you go looking.
An outpoint is a datum that does not fit
The source opens with two short definitions. An outpoint is any datum offered as true that turns out to be illogical when you compare it. A pluspoint is the opposite: a datum of truth that holds up when you make the comparison.
An outpoint can be pleasant or unpleasant, big or small. It is a piece of data that does not fit, and it becomes an outpoint the moment it fails the comparison. That is why you can find outpoints without knowing in advance what the problem is.
Say an owner receives a report with one line missing a date. The line is not false. It simply does not fit with the rest.
Or an owner sees two employees reporting on the same task. Neither one lied, and something still does not add up.
A pluspoint looks like this: the same owner pulls her order total from the till system and again from the supplier, and the two figures match. The finding is dull, and it gives her a figure she can build on.
Eleven categories, built up over time
The source never gives the full list in one place. Categories were added gradually, as the work went on. It includes an omitted datum, a wrong sequence, a falsehood, a wrong target and contrary facts, plus six more.
There is no need to memorise all eleven. According to the booklet, four of them cover most of what you will meet in a small business.
What the list does in practice is make you see things that were in front of you all along. Say an owner goes through his weekly report with the list beside him and finds four outpoints in a report he has read twenty times.
Or an owner finds that the same outpoint keeps coming back in her business: dropped time, meaning a date missing where a date has to be.
Or an installer goes through three job sheets and finds the same item missing from each one: who signed off that the job was finished.
The strongest is what is not there
According to the source, one category is worth more than the others: “An omitted anything is an outpoint.”
The reason it is the strongest is simple. The source calls it easily the most overlooked outpoint, because it is not there to attract attention.
So when you are looking for a cause and not finding one, this is the category to come back to. Your eye goes over what exists, and the answer usually sits in what does not.
Say an owner spent two weeks searching for what he was doing wrong in his sales process. The process had no follow-up step at all, so there was nothing there to find.
Or a studio owner checked why her projects kept overrunning. She had no definition of when a project is done, so no project ever finished.
Or an installer checked why complaints kept coming in. There was never a conversation with the customer before the job started.
The categories overlap, and that is fine
The categories are not separate boxes. The source explains how one of them was born. Two facts that contradict each other were once classed as a falsehood, since one of them must be false. But when you analyse data you cannot tell offhand which one is the false fact, so the pair became a category of its own.
It is not the only such pair. According to the source, wrong source and wrong target are two sides of one coin.
That releases you from the fear of sorting wrongly. An outpoint that looks like both a falsehood and contrary facts is still an outpoint, and there is no problem in that. What matters is noticing. The sorting comes afterwards.
Say an owner cannot decide whether a report that arrived without a date is an omitted datum or dropped time. In both cases he will do the same thing.
Or an owner marked an outpoint as shifted importance, and in hindsight it was a wrong target. She found the cause either way.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: scanning, and counting. The booklet also has the full table of the eleven categories, with what each one means in a small business. After the self-check it moves on to four outpoints that appear in almost every small business.
The next time you look at a report and see nothing in it, look for what is not written there as well.