Curate: Trust the Answer (The Four Moves — A Field Guide to Data-Driven Decisions)

A number that can be reached in hours is not yet a number two people will agree on. Meridian could answer "what's our margin" fast — the problem was getting three different, equally defensible answers from three different teams, all correct, all disagreeing.

Curate is the second guide in THE FOUR MOVES series: how to give a business number one owner, one published definition, and a promise that survives contact with a second opinion. Grounded in real research — Gartner's finding that poor data quality costs organisations at least $12.9 million a year, and audit data showing multiple legitimate definitions of "earnings" already coexist at 97% of S&P 500 companies — this guide shows curation is normal, necessary work, not a sign of disorganisation.

• A test for which numbers actually deserve curation investment, and which don't
• The Metric Dictionary, Certification Tiers, and Data Contract — three artifacts credited to their real methodological roots (DAMA's data quality framework, Chad Sanderson's data contracts) and applied concretely
• A worked case: reconciling four charts of accounts into one trusted group number, without waiting years for a system migration

Read after Open, or on its own if trust — not reach — is where your own numbers keep breaking down.