The most dangerous number in your spreadsheet is blank.
A blank cell is counted as zero. Even if that’s far from the truth.
John Sterman at MIT put it best. When something matters and you do not quantify it, you give it the only value it cannot possibly have.
Zero.
No one decides the value is zero. But when no number is provided, that’s taken as meaning zero.
Leaders routinely underestimate the financial value of sustainability by 4x to 10x. That is not conservatism. That is being precisely wrong.
Submerged benefits one manufacturer was not counting, in a single factory waste program.
CORE™ model · €20B European manufacturer · conservative basis
What they counted, and what they missed.
A twenty billion euro European manufacturer set out to cut factory waste. They counted lower disposal fees and cheaper raw material purchasing. The numbers did not clear the bar.
Two dozen effects in total. Every one tangible. Every one set to zero, because nobody had counted it.
Replace the zeros with numbers that survive scrutiny.
Not perfect numbers. Defensible ones, at the conservative end, with the method attached and the range stated underneath.
We agree scope, method, and confidence interval before anything is modeled, so the figure arrives with its audit trail rather than needing one built afterward.
Decisions get made from spreadsheets, not speeches. The financial case is usually already there. It is just submerged.
What is the one line item your organization still defaults to zero?