One of my favorite clients is an artist who runs a neighborhood cafe — coincidentally, also my favorite cafe in Chicago. She recently came into the role of CFO, and we’ve been crunching some numbers together, looking at trends. After a lengthy evening of meeting, training, analysis and instruction (keep in mind she’d already worked an entire shift at the cafe; I’m frequently amazed at my clients’ commitment to what they’ve built) she then went off to do some investigation and problem-solving of her own. After a couple of astute and insightful questions from her the following day, via email, I happened to see the amazing post above on instagram.

I often laugh about how in my line of work, consulting with small business owners, I’m either friends with the client first, or we become friends through working together. Either way, I’m a pretty lucky CPA to have as many friends as clients as I do. An amusing side effect of this is that I see their posts on social media and they see mine — sometimes I’ll be complaining about my hard day at work, and I have to think twice about who will see the post. Sometimes it happens the other way around… for example, the client who posts about hating QuickBooks or procrastinating on a job I need them to get done.

To go back to the initial post — I call it the Poetry of Numbers. How do you know which ones to trust? How can you identify patterns if your mechanisms are faulty? What to trust and what not to trust is a never-ending problem of bad data. As accountants, we try to put systems in place to make sure the numbers are reliable… to do so helps the client create and then read a story about their own business.

But when you see a story that doesn’t make sense, or your gut tells you it can’t be right, or you can’t find a reason for the storybook characters to do what they’re doing, then you have to ask a different set of questions, starting with, “how did this data get here? where did it come from? how was it generated? did systems or procedures change at some point?” Otherwise you’ll become overwhelmed by interpreting data and connecting it with reality.

I love this work of art and accompanying statement. It describes links that suggest order and yet imagery that defies meaning. The dreamlike surrealism, broken images and weird connections all contribute to the sense of being lost inside your own data, inside your systems, your head. It wrestles with trust.

Feeling very grateful to have clients who are able to illustrate — quite literally — the poetry inherent in the work we do.