Episode 6
Ten Ideas, Six Spots
Prioritizing is not a substitute for measuring — it is the first test. The finale of the series, and your last session on this board.
The list came from the board, and it was long. Ten ideas, in the order they arrived:
- Pre-orders for the families on the meadow
- Test another pitch
- Raise the price to €1.50
- The second lake on the other side of the woods
- A sign at the path junction
- An umbrella deal with the kiosk for rainy days
- A bigger cooler
- A second flavor
- A loyalty card: ten ice creams, the eleventh free
- Longer hours
Mira does arithmetic before she sorts. Twelve selling days are left before school starts. Any idea she takes seriously costs at least two of them, because one day proves nothing. Twelve divided by two is six.
She does not say “I can’t do all of that.” She says: “I’ll do these six first, and here is my reasoning — you may re-sort it.”
One number to sort against
The sorting runs against a single figure: what an hour at the stand brings in, in euros. At pitch A that is €6.50 today. The line from Episode 4 sits at €5.
Ice creams per hour stays the everyday face of that figure for as long as the price holds still. The moment the price moves, it stops working: at €1.50 an ice cream the unit count drops and the tin can still be fuller. Which is exactly why the cobra is in Episode 4. Reward the unit count and you get unit count.
The six, in her order
Test another pitch. The only idea on the list with a measurement already behind it: four ice creams an hour separated A from B. Wrong if the third pitch comes in under thirteen.
Raise the price to €1.50. Margin goes from €0.50 to €1.00, so she only needs 6.5 an hour to match today’s €6.50. She is allowed to lose half her customers and break even on the change. Wrong if two days at the new price leave less than 6.5 an hour.
A sign at the path junction. Costs one piece of cardboard, one marker, and no selling day. Wrong if two days with the sign don’t beat two days without — in which case it cost a piece of cardboard.
A bigger cooler. The first step is not a purchase, it is a time of day. On day one the box was empty by evening and nobody knows since when. If it never empties before closing, the idea is dead for free. If it empties at three, her ceiling was never the lake — it was the box.
A second flavor. For four days she counts how many people ask for something else and walk on without buying. Those are the planes from Episode 3 that don’t come back. Wrong if fewer than ten people ask in four days.
Longer hours. Not “longer,” but hour by hour: every edge hour gets priced against the €5 line on its own. Whatever clears it stays in the plan. Whatever doesn’t clear it gets cut, however industrious it feels.
The four that wait
Pre-orders. Not one person has ever asked. That would be the fix for a problem she has never once counted.
The second lake. She can only stand on one shore. That is not an idea, that is a second Mira.
The umbrella deal. A new product, a new partner and a new kind of weather all at once — on the days with the fewest people at the lake.
The loyalty card. Every eleventh ice cream free pushes her margin from €0.50 to €0.41 and moves her line from ten to a little over twelve an hour, before a single extra one is sold. Whether anyone comes twice at all is something she has never counted.
Why this already counts as measuring
Read the six paragraphs above again and watch for the same element in each: the condition under which Mira concedes she was wrong.
That turns the list from an opinion with a running order into one A hypothesis is a guess that can be proven wrong — 'ice cream sells better on Mondays' can be measured, so it qualifies. 'That's just how the market is' doesn't. A priority list without a hypothesis is just an opinion with a running order. full card per line. “I believe these six matter most” is a claim that can fail, and being able to fail is the only quality of it that counts.
It also disposes of the objection that comes first in every company: no time to measure. The test week in Episode 5 cost Mira no selling day at all — she sold, and wrote down where she was standing. And prioritizing happens anyway. Someone with no time to measure still has a running order, just one that nobody can disprove. What can’t be disproved doesn’t get better either.
Your priority list isn’t an excuse to skip measuring — it’s your first hypothesis.
Your seat on the board
You have been sitting on this board for five episodes, and you have done some damage.
In Episode 1 you told her to go faster. In Episode 2 that advice cost €10. In Episode 3 you had an explanation her data could not test. In Episode 4 you handed her a number she could decide something with. In Episode 5 you made her build a comparison instead of just moving.
Now you have sent in ten ideas, and an eleven-year-old is handing four of them back — with reasoning, and an invitation to re-sort.
That is the whole exercise. A board that supplies ideas and asks for no reasoning gets a list. A board that asks of every idea what would prove it wrong gets a plan.
Your own ten ideas are sitting on your own desk. The numbers are bigger. The arithmetic is the same.
Where to go from here
If you want to know how fast decisions actually get made where you work: the decision check is ten questions and two minutes, with no form — your answers never leave your browser.
If a term from this series still feels loose: the ice glossary has every one of them as a card, explained at the ice cream stand.
Tools change. Models stay.
Where this leads
Advisor
Occasional sparring, for when a decision is in front of you and you want to turn it over with someone from the outside.