Version Next: Tell Me What You've Noticed

I was fifteen years old in 1982, lying in one of the twin beds in my bedroom, listening to Bob Uecker call a Milwaukee Brewers game on a little black transistor radio with two dials—one for tuning and one for volume.

The radio sat on the nightstand beside my bed. Next to it was a Brewers pocket schedule, folded open and consulted often enough that I could have told you who they were playing that night—and who they were playing in the series after that.

This was how I followed baseball.

Only about sixty of the Brewers' 162 games were televised locally that year. When they were on television, I watched from our family room. When they weren't, which was most of the time, I listened from my bedroom.

And I knew that team.

Paul Molitor led off. Robin Yount batted second. Cecil Cooper hit third. Ted Simmons, a switch-hitting catcher, hit cleanup. Ben Oglivie and Gorman Thomas usually followed, switching places in the batting order depending on whether the Brewers were facing a right-handed or left-handed pitcher. Roy Howell was usually the designated hitter, although Don Money or Larry Hisle might be there instead. Charlie Moore. Jim Gantner.

I knew the lineup. I knew the players. I knew the rhythms of that team.

I listened. I watched. And I was at County Stadium twenty-two times that year, including the postseason with people I loved.

The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers were not something I learned about later. I was there.

And Robin Yount batted second.

Except he didn't.

At least not at first. I wouldn't discover that for another thirty-eight years.

…

In the spring of 2020, there was no baseball.

Spring Training never happened stopped. Opening Day came and went without an opening pitch. The COVID-19 pandemic had shut down Major League Baseball along with almost everything else, and what was normally one of the most predictable rhythms of my year simply wasn't there.

I missed it. So, I decided to create a little baseball of my own.

Beginning on what should have been Opening Day, I started going back through the 1982 Brewers season. Each morning, I would research the game the Brewers had played on the corresponding date thirty-eight years earlier. I would post the score on Facebook, find a photograph of that day's hero, and include his statistics from the game.

Yes. I am exactly that kind of baseball nerd.

Most mornings, I did the research while lying in bed next to Jody. Different bedroom. Different bed. Different technology. Same Brewers.

And somewhere along the way, I noticed something strange. Robin Yount wasn't batting second.

I don't remember the first box score that caught my attention. There was no dramatic moment when I sat upright in bed and announced that everything I had ever believed was a lie.

I just noticed. Yount wasn't where I expected him to be. Then I looked at another game. And another. And eventually, I understood what I was seeing.

Robin Yount hadn't always batted second.

He eventually moved into that spot. He spent most of the season there. He became the Robin Yount I remembered, batting between Molitor and Cooper in the middle of one of the most formidable lineups in baseball. He also became the American League's Most Valuable Player that year. Unanimously.

So the thing I had remembered for nearly forty years wasn't exactly wrong.

It just wasn't completely true.

And learning that didn't bother me. I didn't feel embarrassed. I didn't suddenly question whether I knew anything about the Brewers. I didn't surrender my credentials as a fan, pack up my baseball cards, and begin following soccer.

I thought it was fascinating.

Huh.

I didn't know that.

And then I knew something I hadn't known before. The story I had carried for nearly forty years became a little more true.

When the Stakes Get Higher

That's easy when we're talking about a baseball lineup. It gets considerably harder when the thing we discover isn't trivia.

What happens when the thing that needs revising is something we have believed deeply? Something we have taught? Something we have defended? Something we have built around?

What happens when new evidence doesn't merely challenge something we remember, but something we have incorporated into our understanding of who we are?

For years, I built pre-opening restaurant budgets the way many people in the industry still build them.

We looked at demographics. We looked at driving traffic and walking traffic. We looked at the number of businesses and residences within one mile, three miles and five miles. We looked at household income, population, competition and market characteristics.

All useful information. All real data.

And then, somehow, we performed a little magic.

From all of those facts, we determined how many people would walk through the front door of a restaurant that hadn't opened yet. We multiplied those people by an estimated average spend, extended the calculation across weeks and months, and arrived at a projected top-line revenue number.

There it was. Right there in the spreadsheet.

$2,843,716.

Look at those commas. Must be true. Except it wasn't.

Or, more accurately, we couldn't know that it was.

The demographic data might be accurate. The traffic counts might be accurate. The number of households within three miles might be accurate.

The problem wasn't necessarily in the facts. The problem occurred in the story we told about the relationship between those facts.

I remember an example from a statistics class I took years ago.

The murder rate in the United States is highest in July.

More ice cream is sold in July than in any other month.

Therefore: Ice cream causes murder.

Obviously, it doesn't.

But that's the point. We don't necessarily need bad information to reach a bad conclusion. Sometimes we just need good information, an unexamined assumption, and enough confidence to connect them.

And spreadsheets can make that confidence look remarkably convincing.

The precision of the output disguises the uncertainty of the inputs.

An assumption puts on a tie and introduces itself as knowledge.

For a long time, I accepted that introduction. Until I didn't.

Once You See It

Once I saw the problem, I couldn't unsee it. That didn't mean there was only one thing I could do next. There almost never is.

I could have continued building revenue projections the same way. People expected them. Clients wanted to know the number. Lenders wanted to see the number. The industry had been producing numbers like it for years.

I could have told myself that the methodology wasn't perfect, but it was the best we had. I could have quietly changed the way I worked without saying anything about the way I used to work.

Pretending I hadn't noticed was a possibility, too. An irresponsible one, I believe. But still a possibility.

Because recognition doesn't take away agency. You get to choose what happens next.

And because you get to choose, you also own what follows from that choice. I chose to revise.

I rebuilt the way I construct pre-opening budgets. Instead of pretending I can accurately predict the top-line revenue of a restaurant that does not yet exist, I begin with what we can know and identify what we cannot.

What are the costs? What does it take to operate the business? What does break-even require? If the owner wants a ten-percent bottom line, what revenue would be required to produce it? At a particular per-person average spend, how many guests would have to walk through the door?

Now we aren't asking an assumption to masquerade as knowledge. We're identifying the assumptions and allowing the owner to see what would have to become true.

And I didn't make that revision quietly. I wrote about it. I published an article explaining why I had changed my thinking.

And now, when someone asks me to project revenue for a restaurant that hasn't opened yet, I am perfectly comfortable saying:

I can't accurately tell you what that number will be.

I know you want to know. I would love to know, too. It would make both of our jobs considerably easier. But I can't tell you. And anyone who says they can is claiming to know something they cannot possibly know.

That isn't less expertise than I possessed before. I think it's more. Because expertise isn't merely knowing things. Sometimes expertise is knowing enough to recognize what you don't know. And being willing to say so.

The Evidence We Don't Have Yet

I have begun to wonder whether this is what happens to all of us as we move through our lives.

We accumulate evidence. We make decisions from it. We form beliefs. We build things. We teach people. We become certain. And then reality keeps arriving.

The person I was yesterday had access to everything that had happened through yesterday. The person I am today has all of that— plus what happened next.

That doesn't make yesterday's version of me stupid. It doesn't make him fraudulent. And it doesn't mean I owe him permanent agreement. It means he got me here.

He made decisions with the reasoning, context and evidence available to him. Sometimes he got things remarkably right. Sometimes he made assumptions he didn't recognize as assumptions. Sometimes he was simply wrong.

But occasionally, he did something even more important. He acted without knowing what would happen. And because he did, he created evidence I could never have possessed otherwise.

I spent eight years working for Applebee's early in my career.

By the time I left, I knew that company extraordinarily well. I knew the systems, the procedures, the specifications, the expectations. I had become General Manager of one of the highest-volume restaurants in the region, and my restaurant was used as a manager training location.

I was good at what I did. And I knew the environment in which I was doing it. Those two things had become so intertwined that I wasn't entirely sure where one ended and the other began.

When I eventually decided to leave, I knew I was walking away from a place where I had become successful and into an organization where almost everything would be unfamiliar.

The systems. The culture. The expectations. The people.

I could prepare for that. I could ask questions. I could learn everything available to me before I started.

But there was one question preparation couldn't answer: Would I still be good at what I did somewhere else?

There was only one way to find out. I had to go.

And after I did, after I had spent enough time watching and learning and absorbing the new environment, I remember the Recognition arriving:

Woah. I'm still really good at this. The competence came with me.

I had confused knowing an environment with knowing myself. Applebee's Andrew couldn't have known that. He hadn't lived it yet. He had no evidence. I do. Because he went first.

And if I could sit across from him now, I don't think I would ask why he had been so uncertain.

I think I'd tell him:

Of course you weren't sure.

You hadn't met me yet.

Maybe that's what Version Previous gives Version Next. Not certainty. Not a finished set of conclusions. Not instructions requiring the person we become to preserve everything the person we were believed.

Something better…

Reasoning.

Context.

Evidence.

The history of revision.

And permission to keep noticing.

Here's what I knew. Here's what I believed. Here's why I believed it. Here's where I was making an assumption. Here's what I couldn't possibly have known yet. Here's what happened when reality arrived. Here's what I changed. Here's what I still don't know.

Take this.

Go farther than I could.

And when you get there—

don't defend me.

Tell me what you've noticed.

Build It. Break It. Build It Again.

And sometimes the only way to notice is to begin.

A few years ago, when Jensen Cummings and I were working together, we had a phrase we used constantly:

Build it. Break it. Build it again.

It could be a budget. An internal process. A piece of writing. A service we were developing. Almost anything. We weren't trying to create bad first versions so we could congratulate ourselves for fixing them later.

We were acknowledging something we didn't yet have language for:

Some information becomes available only after the thing exists. You can plan. You can research. You can prepare. You can ask one more question. You can—and should—build the best version you are capable of building with the reasoning, context and evidence available to you.

But eventually, you have to build it. Because there is a point at which more preparation stops producing new evidence. Action becomes the research.

That is particularly difficult for those of us who like to be prepared.

And by “those of us,” I mean me. Obviously. I have been known to prepare for the preparation required to begin preparing. There may be a spreadsheet. Probably several.

I make no apologies. But I have also learned that preparation can become a remarkably sophisticated form of procrastination.

I'm not ready yet. I need to think about it a little longer. I need more information. The website isn't quite ready. I haven't even settled on the name.

At some point: Just pick a damn name.

The problem isn't preparation. Preparation can be an act of love. The problem is asking preparation to give us something it cannot. You cannot prepare your way into possessing evidence that only action can create.

I couldn't know whether my capability would travel beyond Applebee's until I left Applebee's.

I couldn't know whether my new budgeting methodology would work better until I started using it.

Jensen and I couldn't know everything that would happen to a process before we put the process into operation.

Build it. Then let reality encounter it. What worked? What didn't? What did we assume? What happened that we didn't anticipate? What became visible only because we began?

Tell me what you've noticed.

Then build it again. But “again” doesn't necessarily mean differently. Revision doesn't require change. It requires availability to change.

Sometimes we build something, encounter reality, examine what happened, and discover that the thing works exactly as intended.

Great. Leave it alone.

A living document doesn't need to be rewritten every Tuesday simply to prove that it's alive. The point isn't constant change. The point is that nothing becomes permanently exempt from attention simply because it worked before.

I call budgets, training guides, handbooks, standard operating procedures and many of the other tools I create “living documents” for exactly this reason. Their usefulness depends upon their continuing encounter with reality.

Before a restaurant opens, I can build a budget from the best information available. But after the doors open, reality begins supplying information that no pre-opening spreadsheet could possess.

Actual guest counts. Actual spending. Actual labor. Actual purchasing. Actual operating behavior.

The original budget wasn't necessarily wrong because those numbers weren't included. They didn't exist yet.

But once they do, pretending they don't because we prefer the assumptions we started with isn't discipline. It's denial. The document stays useful because we allow reality to keep teaching us something. Maybe that's true of us, too.

When Reality Votes 5–1

In 2025, the Milwaukee Brewers finished the regular season with the best record in baseball. I believed they could win the World Series. Not because I am a Brewers fan and therefore contractually obligated to lose all capacity for rational thought every October.

Although that should not be ruled out.

They were good. Really good. They earned a first-round bye. Their pitching lined up well for the postseason. They had enough offense. They had played consistently excellent baseball.

And after beating the Chicago Cubs three games to two in the National League Division Series—which was considerably more difficult than I would have preferred—they advanced to the National League Championship Series for the first time since 2018.

I was ecstatic. Their opponent was the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Brewers had home-field advantage in the NLCS. They had also played the Dodgers six times during the regular season. They won all six.

And because Milwaukee had finished with the best record in baseball, if they reached the World Series, the first two games would be played at home.

So I did what any completely rational, evidence-driven adult with decades of professional experience examining assumptions would do. I bought a plane ticket to Milwaukee for the first two games of the World Series. Obviously.

It was refundable. I'm not an animal.

I also reserved a hotel room. Cancellable. Preparation Is Love.

The Brewers lost Game One of the National League Championship Series, 2–1.

Okay. One game.

They lost Game Two, 5–1. Not ideal. But this was a seven-game series.

They lost Game Three, 3–1. At which point the evidence was becoming increasingly impolite.

Then they lost Game Four, 5–1. Series over. Four games. Four losses. Four total runs.

The team with the best record in baseball, the team that had swept all six regular-season games against the Dodgers, the team I believed could reach the World Series—had been swept.

There was no longer anything to project. No model to adjust. No additional game from which to gather evidence. Reality had answered the question. And I didn't like the answer.

I wish I could tell you I had spent the entire series objectively evaluating the available evidence as it accumulated.

I had not. After Game One, I had explanations. After Game Two, I had more. After Game Three, there was still technically another baseball game to play. The evidence was there. I just wasn't particularly interested in admitting all of it into the story I wanted to tell.

That's different. And it's considerably more uncomfortable. Because sometimes the obstacle to seeing something more true isn't that we lack information. Sometimes we have the information. We just don't like where it leads.

Confirmation bias doesn't require us to fabricate evidence. It can be considerably subtler than that. We can accept every individual fact while continuing to protect the conclusion we prefer.

The Brewers lost Game One. True. But it's only one game.

They lost Game Two. True. But teams come back from two games down.

They lost Game Three. True. But the series isn't technically over.

Every statement can be accurate while the story connecting them becomes increasingly desperate.

Eventually, reality gets a vote. And sometimes reality votes 5–1.

That is where “Question Everything” becomes more demanding than I once understood it to be.

It can't mean: Question everything until the evidence agrees with me.

It has to include questioning the person doing the questioning. What am I protecting? What evidence am I explaining away because I don't like where it leads? Am I actually trying to understand what is happening—or am I using my ability to reason to defend what I already believe?

Expertise doesn't make us immune from that. Sometimes expertise makes us better at it.

We know more. We have more experience. We possess more language. We can construct better arguments. And if we're not careful, all of that capability can be deployed in service of defending yesterday.

Being good at reasoning doesn't guarantee that we're reasoning toward truth. Sometimes we're reasoning toward safety. Or identity. Or hope. Or pride. Or the outcome we've already purchased a refundable Southwest ticket to see.

The Commitment Is to the Noticing

Truth doesn't owe us comfort. It doesn't owe us disappointment, either. Truth isn't inherently painful.

Sometimes discovering something more true is exhilarating. Sometimes it gives us freedom. Sometimes it confirms something we desperately hoped was real. Sometimes it makes us laugh at something we've confidently misremembered for nearly forty years. And sometimes it breaks our heart. Truth simply is.

Our willingness to encounter it is something else.

Which means perhaps the courage to disagree with ourselves isn't really about changing our minds. Maybe it's about trust.

Can I trust myself enough to look? Can I trust myself enough to discover that something I believe isn't quite right? Can I trust myself enough to revise something I have taught publicly? Can I trust myself enough to admit that an assumption I defended was only an assumption? Can I trust myself enough to begin before I possess evidence that cannot exist until after I begin?

And perhaps most difficult: Can I remain available to what is true when I don't know what discovering it will ask of me?

Because once I notice something, I still get to choose what happens next. Recognition doesn't eliminate agency. It creates possibilities. I can investigate. I can revise. I can act. I can wait. I can ask someone else what they see. I can decide the evidence isn't sufficient yet.

I can even pretend I haven't noticed. That's a possibility, too. But possibilities have consequences. And agency carries ownership.

You get to choose what happens next. And because you get to choose, you also own what follows from that choice.

Maybe that's why truth has to matter more than being right. And maybe it has to matter more than something else, too. Truth has to matter more than being pleased with what we discover.

The commitment isn't to the outcome. The commitment is to the noticing.

What We Leave Behind

Which leaves me with a question. If I can't know what Version Next will encounter, what can I possibly give him that will still be useful when he gets there?

I think about this often in the work I do with restaurant leaders. I can give a manager a spreadsheet that calculates food cost. They enter the information. The spreadsheet does the math. It produces a number.

47.3%.

But what if somewhere along the way someone accidentally overwrote a formula? The spreadsheet still opens. It still accepts numbers. It still calculates. It still produces an answer precise to two decimal places. It just isn't telling the truth anymore.

If all I taught the manager was where to enter the numbers and where to read the answer, I've created dependence on the tool. But if I taught the reasoning underneath it, something different can happen.

The manager sees 47.3% and thinks:

That doesn't look right. Then the questions begin. Was the information entered correctly? Is there something happening operationally that we haven't accounted for? Is something wrong with the spreadsheet itself?

And after investigating, the manager may discover something else. The spreadsheet is working perfectly.

Food cost really is 47.3%.

Shit. Reality gets another vote. The point isn't to teach someone to distrust the spreadsheet. And it certainly isn't to teach them to keep questioning the number until they find one they like better. The point is to give them enough understanding to recognize when something deserves another look.

It provides information. The person provides understanding.

That's the difference between giving someone an answer and giving them the capacity to recognize when the answer can no longer be trusted.

And maybe that's one of the most important things we can give the people who come after us. Not conclusions they are required to preserve. Not even the tool itself. The ability to notice.

I used to believe that leadership meant having answers. Then I believed it meant asking better questions. I still believe questions matter enormously. But today I think my responsibility begins even earlier. Listen better.

Because the quality of the question I ask depends upon the quality of the listening that preceded it. That's not a repudiation of what I believed before. The earlier truth didn't disappear. It became part of a larger one.

I've experienced the same thing as a consultant.

There was a time when I believed that if someone hired me for my expertise, my responsibility was to tell them what they should do. And, if I'm being completely truthful, there was probably an unspoken second half: And then they should do it. After all, they hired the expert.

Today I understand that responsibility differently. They hired me for my expertise, so I owe them the best thinking I can give them. I owe them possibilities. I owe them consequences. I owe them my reasoning. I owe them the courage to say when I think they're making a mistake.

But the path? That's theirs to choose.

My expertise doesn't make me the owner of what happens next. It gives me responsibility for the quality of what I contribute to their decision. That may sound like a small distinction. It isn't.

Because I can give someone everything I know and still refuse to require them to become obedient to it.

Inheritance Without Obedience

Maybe that's the difference between inheritance and instruction.

Instruction says: Do what I did.

Inheritance says: Take what I learned.

There's a lot packed inside that difference. If all I leave behind is the conclusion, the person who receives it has only two choices.

Accept it. Or reject it.

But if I leave the reasoning, something else becomes possible. They can understand where the conclusion came from. They can see the evidence that supported it. They can recognize the assumptions beneath it. They can see what happened when reality arrived. They can understand what changed and why.

And when they encounter something I never did—they can continue.

That's the inheritance I want to leave. Not because I expect everything I believe today to eventually be proven wrong. I don't. I hold some beliefs deeply. I have experience supporting them. Evidence supporting them. A lifetime supporting some of them.

I am willing to make decisions from them. I am willing to teach them. I am willing to build around them.

And I refuse to require the person I become to agree with me. Because he will know something I cannot know. He will know what happened next.

The Person Who Goes First

I wonder sometimes what fifteen-year-old me would think if I could walk into that bedroom in 1982. He's lying on one of the twin beds. The Brewers pocket schedule is on the nightstand. The little black transistor radio is beside it. Bob Uecker is calling the game.

I know things he doesn't know. So many things. I know where he will live. I know the work he will eventually do. I know people he hasn't met yet. I know decisions he will make. I know some of the things he will get right. I know some of the things he will get spectacularly wrong. I know things that will happen to him that he couldn't possibly imagine from that bedroom.

And I know that somewhere during that baseball season, Robin Yount is going to move into the second spot in the batting order.

The kid on the bed doesn't know any of that. He can't. He hasn't lived it yet.

But here's the part I don't want to forget: I don't get to be here without him.

He goes first. Every Version Previous does. They make the decisions. They take the risks. They believe things. They misunderstand things. They prepare. They procrastinate. They begin. They fuck things up. They learn. They build something. They break it. They build it again.

And eventually, they hand everything they have learned to us.

Maybe our responsibility isn't to preserve it exactly as they gave it to us. Maybe it's to receive it honestly. Understand why it was believed. Carry forward what remains true. Revise what reality has taught us to see differently. And then keep going.

Because someday Version Next will become Version Previous, too. There will be a version of me who knows what happens tomorrow.

I haven't met him yet. I hope I leave him something useful. The best thinking I am capable of today. The assumptions I know I'm making. The things I still don't know. The reasoning beneath what I believe. And the stories of the times reality taught me to look again.

Then I hope I trust him.

Take this.

Go farther than I could.

If something still holds, carry it. If reality gives you reason to question it, look again. If you discover something more true, don't protect me from it.

I don't need you to prove I was right. I need you to keep paying attention.

When you get here, don't defend me. Tell me what you've noticed.

And then? What Happens Next Is Yours.

A Question to Carry With You

What might become visible if you stopped needing what you already believe to remain true?