VICI Insights • Operator Track • Week 02

Your Team Isn't Aligned. They Just Use the Same Words to Mean Different Things.

The most expensive document in your company is the one that doesn't exist: a single page saying what your words actually mean.

Most "alignment problems" aren't alignment problems. Your team agrees in the room — then the numbers never reconcile. That's not politics. It's that "revenue," "churn," and "active customer" mean three different things to three different systems.

Gartner research from 2020 puts the average cost of poor data quality at $12.9 million per year. Definition drift is the cheapest slice of that to fix.

Here's the 3-part framework I use with operators:

• Name the words that start fights. The 10–15 terms two teams define differently — "lead," "churn," "booked revenue," "on-time." If it triggers a debate, it belongs on the list.

• One sentence + one owner per term. Plain-English meaning, the exact logic behind it, and the single named person accountable. If you can't write it in a sentence, that's the misalignment — surfaced.

• Make the page the tiebreaker. Pin it next to the reports. When two numbers disagree, you fix the definition, not the argument. The dictionary — not the loudest voice — wins.

As HBR's DalleMule and Davenport noted in 2017, the same raw data often needs different cuts for different functions — but those cuts need to be named and governed, not accidental.

Shared definitions are the first brick. Every report, metric, and automation sits on top of them. Get the words wrong and everything downstream inherits the error. You can't innovate on a broken foundation.

If you're trying to get more out of your operation before you spend on more tools, I'm always glad to compare notes — reach out on LinkedIn. More of my work is at www.consultvici.com.

What's one term your teams define differently — and has it ever burned you?