Main idea

A logistics manager finds the receiving screen too heavy: his receiving clerks enter everything at the end of the day and have forgotten half the discrepancies. Another made the batch number, the expiry date and the discrepancy reason mandatory: his teams tick "quantity compliant" everywhere to move on to the next truck. Financial control, for its part, can no longer reconcile order, receipt and invoice without discrepancies entered line by line.

When it comes time to sum up for the product team, the sentence writes itself: "we need to simplify receiving while making the data reliable". It is correct and perfectly useless. The two pieces of feedback are not saying the same thing with different nuances: they describe two realities that pull the decision in opposite directions, and that, precisely, is the product problem.

The smoothed summary makes it disappear. It produces knowledge that looks coherent but no longer matches what customers said; everyone projects whatever they want onto it, and the decision gets made on a fiction.

Why it matters

The erased problem does not disappear: it comes back in production, as a simplified screen that accounting rejects, or as a reliable screen that the dock works around. The cost of smoothing is therefore paid later, and somewhere other than where it was committed.

Nuances and limits

Not every summary is smoothing: grouping feedback that really says the same thing is legitimate. Smoothing starts when the phrasing reconciles feedback that is in opposition.

Open questions

• How can you tell, when reading a summary already written, that it has absorbed a contradiction?