The real cost of bullshit math

9 May 2025 Reading Time: 5 minutes

by Sharon O’Dea

Every few months, a post does the rounds on LinkedIn claiming that a bad intranet costs an organisation $16.8 million a year. It’s based on a McKinsey report that found employees spend 1.8 hours a day searching for information. Multiply that by the average wage and number of employees, and—voilà!—you’ve got a headline-grabbing justification for a new platform.

I get why it’s tempting. I’ve used similar figures myself. If I’m honest, they were mostly the unsuccessful ones.

The problem is, these kinds of claims don’t land with the people who hold the purse strings. Worse, they erode our credibility as internal communications professionals. As Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” But if we keep measuring the wrong thing—or worse, using numbers with no meaningful link to business outcomes—we shouldn’t be surprised when we’re not invited to the decision-making table.

This post isn’t about tearing anyone down. It’s about asking us, as a profession, to do better. To stop relying on seductive but shallow numbers. To stop cheering on takes with more holes than Swiss cheese. And to start showing up with the kind of serious, business-aligned thinking the C-suite expects.

Why this doesn’t wash with CFOs

Let’s be clear: no CFO is greenlighting a multi-million-dollar investment because someone did some napkin maths using a flawed McKinsey stat from 2012.

The real issue is that this kind of logic relies on a false assumption: that available productive time equals actual productive time. It assumes that if someone spends 1.8 hours a day searching, and you reduce that, the time saved is instantly converted into meaningful work. But that’s not how work, or people, operate.

It’s the same flawed thinking that says, “Coffee breaks cost the company 15 minutes a day, so let’s cancel them.” Sure. But will those 15 minutes actually be reinvested in high-value tasks? Or will they just disappear into the general noise of the working day?

Unless you can show how that recovered time drives business value—more sales calls, faster onboarding, fewer errors—it’s just a theoretical gain, not a financial one.

CFOs deal in actuals. They want to know:

* What cost will this avoid?

* What risk will it reduce?

* What revenue will it protect or enable?

‘Productivity savings’ are the flimsiest line in any business case. They sound good in a slide deck, but rarely survive contact with finance. As the saying goes, “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination.” These calculations may feel strong, but they don’t help anyone see more clearly.

Fluffy time-saving numbers don’t affect outcomes. Operational risks, compliance gaps, reputational damage: those do. If we want to make a case that holds up in front of a CFO, we need to illuminate the real impact, not just prop up a weak argument.

Too often, we show up talking about how people feel (frustrated, disengaged, annoyed) without connecting those feelings to a measurable cost to the business. Or we throw around big numbers without explaining what they actually mean for operational performance or strategic goals.

If we want to be taken seriously, we have to present our cases in terms the board recognises: money, risk, retention, and compliance. Not just “people are spending time searching.”

The real cost of poor digital experience

Time spent searching isn’t the problem—it’s the symptom. The real issue is what happens because people can’t find what they need.

If a frontline worker can’t access a safety procedure, that’s not a productivity issue—it’s a compliance risk. If a salesperson uses outdated product information, that’s not inefficiency—it’s potentially lost revenue. If an employee disengages because they can’t navigate a cluttered intranet, that contributes to attrition and all the costs that come with it.

A 2021 Forrester study linked poor digital employee experiences to higher turnover, slower onboarding, and lower customer satisfaction. These aren’t abstract productivity losses, they’re measurable outcomes that hit the bottom line.

I’ve seen organisations where:

* Inability to find updated policies led to audit failures

* Out-of-date product content delayed launches

* New joiners floundered without proper induction

* Time-critical tasks were missed because key information was buried across systems

These are quantifiable and solvable problems, but only if you frame them correctly. Not as “people are frustrated,” but as “this frustration creates X cost, Y risk, and Z delay.” That’s how you move from anecdote to evidence—and from service function to strategic partner.

Why this kind of thinking harms the comms industry

The $16.8 million stat isn’t just ineffective. It’s damaging.

When we lean on vague numbers and soft logic, we reinforce the perception that comms professionals don’t understand how business decisions are made. We position ourselves as lightweight and non-strategic, and then wonder why we’re not in the room where decisions get made.

It creates two outcomes, both bad:

* Our business cases get rejected because they don’t stand up to scrutiny

* Our programmes get underfunded because they’re seen as “nice-to-haves,” not business-critical infrastructure

Worse, this groupthink stifles our ability to challenge lazy thinking. Instead of interrogating these numbers, we celebrate them. Instead of pushing for better evidence, we settle for applause.

As Benedict Evans put it, “If you’re not careful, you can mistake consensus for correctness.” And in this case, consensus is killing credibility.

We can’t keep complaining that we’re not taken seriously by the board if we keep turning up with arguments that would get laughed out of a boardroom. It’s time to raise the bar.

What we should be doing instead

So what does a credible business case look like? Like any other strategic investment, it starts with:

* What’s the problem?

* What’s the business impact?

* What’s the cost of doing nothing?

* What are the measurable outcomes of fixing it?

We need to stop treating comms and intranet work as soft interventions and start treating them as infrastructure: essential systems that underpin how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how risk is managed.

That means gathering real evidence:

* Analytics that show critical content is buried or ignored

* Helpdesk tickets that point to recurring failures in communication

* Onboarding delays caused by broken journeys

* Policy breaches linked to poor access or version control

It means building business cases around what leaders actually care about: operational resilience, compliance, cost efficiency, and workforce retention. It means borrowing rigour from disciplines like marketing or UX, instead of relying on guesswork, sentiment and McKinsey maths.

And most of all, it means expecting more from ourselves and each other.

Instead, let’s raise the bar

If we want to be seen as business-critical, we have to act like it.

That means dropping the vague maths and lazy logic. It means challenging the feel-good stats and back-of-the-envelope calculations that do nothing to advance our cause. It means holding ourselves—and each other—to higher standards. We need to speak the language of the business. That’s numbers, yes—but the right numbers. Risks avoided. Revenue protected. Outcomes improved.

Our credibility is our capital. So when we rely on simplistic, surface-level thinking, we don’t just weaken our own case, we weaken our whole profession.

We have the opportunity to lead, but only if we speak the language of leadership.

That means clarity. Credibility. Real commercial impact.

Not just for our own projects, but for the future of internal communications as a serious, strategic function.

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Sharon O’Dea is a digital workplace expert and co-founder of Lithos Partners, helping complex organisations design intranets and communications that actually work.

Written by: Editor