Little Openings

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I’ve long been intrigued by the innocuous power of Little Openings.

Say you are walking down a corridor with your hands full of papers and books. Before long, they start to slip. As you try to stabilise the falling papers, the rest go down in a clatter and flutter. However, a passerby in the corridor kneels down to help you pick everything up. They say hello. You say thank you. You each introduce yourselves, maybe exchange a laugh. You go on your way, books and papers in hand, feeling good about things with a new acquaintance. They continue on their way, happier to have helped someone out, and pleased to have met someone new they otherwise would have passed by.

The fall of books and papers, though it would at first seem unhelpful, actually created a little opening that enabled two people to connect who would have passed each other by.

So that’s a Little Opening: a small moment that invites connection.

Small imperfections in daily life often create opportunities for connection that wouldn’t otherwise exist. If everything worked smoothly and efficiently all the time, we’d have fewer opportunities to connect. A bit of friction can be a blessing.

In a Little Opening, you don’t have to help somebody, you don’t have to lend eggs to a neighbour, you don’t have to stop and give directions. But there’s an opportunity there, a little opening where you can.

Dogs (and small children) are masters of Little Openings: being inappropriately friendly, running across someone’s path, waiting for them while they snuffle around, or simply walking dogs together.

I’m sure you can think of a host of situations like this.

Reflecting on them, I think these openings are of at least four different types.

Moments of vulnerability

When there’s an opportunity to help in a tough spot

When you can’t work the parking machine
Reaching something off a high shelf
Getting a push chair with a baby up a flight of stairs
Looking lost in a foreign city, holding a map upside down
Helping with a car breakdown
Letting someone know what stop this is on a train
Picking up dropped shopping
Offering your parking spot in a busy parking lot
Borrowing eggs from your neighbour
Helping work the printer

Enforced cooperation

When people have to interact to go on their way

Waiting to let someone pass in a narrow space or on the stairs
Pressing the buttons for others in an elevator
Passing around a leaflet or sign-in sheet
Moving down in a packed commuter train
Clearing your things from a desk as someone sits down

Sometimes connection comes not from kindness or vulnerability, but because people briefly have to coordinate with one another.

Acts of kindness

When an opportunity for generosity presents itself

Holding the door for someone
Offering a snack
Sharing your umbrella
Moving seats for someone at a theatre
Giving away excess food at a picnic or camping
Lending a tool to make someone’s task easier

Micro-connections

Connecting through a moment of shared understanding or shared inconvenience

An old-fashioned cigarette break
Catching someone's eye when a speaker says something you both think is silly/clever/funny
Waiting for a bus or an appointment together
Watching a beautiful sunset
Joining in a round of happy birthday for another table at a restaurant
A mutual groan as a train delay comes through the speaker
Coordinating in a power cut
Saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes

Travel in a foreign country opens up a host of Little Openings. It’s much easier to connect with fellow travellers trying to figure things out abroad than it would be to connect with them at home.

These little openings—through vulnerability, cooperation, kindness, or shared experience—form a little social bridge. Often they relax social barriers—don’t talk in the elevator, keep yourself to yourself, don’t make eye contact.

I stop short of deliberately dropping my books and papers on the floor, but I don’t hesitate to accept help when offered, give it when it might be appreciated or exchange a glance of shared understanding. These small disruptions make my everyday life a little warmer and kinder.

What Little Openings have you experienced?

Brendan Leonard wrote an illustrated story about “When we hold the door ”

Related Ideas to Little Openings

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Published 31 May 2026

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The McNamara Fallacy

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The McNamara Fallacy is a belief in easy-to-measure quantitative metrics at the expense of ignoring hard-to-measure qualitative factors. Robert McNamara was president of Ford Motor Company and later the Secretary of Defense for the USA during the war in Vietnam. He was highly intelligent and excelled at dealing with data and using it to inform strategy. Coined by social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, the McNamara Fallacy, also called the Quantitative Fallacy, involves: Prioritising easier-to-measure quantitative metrics and Disregarding hard-to-measure qualitative metrics as unimportant The fallacy can progress as follows: Measure what can be measured Disregard what we can’t measure Assume what cannot be measured is not important Conclude that what can’t be measured doesn’t exist In the words of Yankelovich: “The fallacy is: If you’re confronted by a complex problem that is full of intangibles, you decide to measure only those aspects of the problem that lend themselves to easy quantification, either because you find other aspects difficult to measure or because you assume that they can’t be very important or don’t even exist.” … “It is a short, fatal step from the statement, ‘There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can’t put on our computers,’ to the statement, ‘Let’s measure what we can and forget about the intangibles.’” Yankelovich cites working with Ford during McNamara’s time and sharing research that included both quantitative and qualitative factors. As the research was assessed, the qualitative data on the meanings people gave to small cars were discarded, and the less significant quantitative and demographic data were retained. Examples of the McNamara Fallacy I first learned about the fallacy from a reader’s article about one of the easiest to measure aspects of a bike: its weight. All things being equal, we’d probably prefer a lighter bike, but other aspects like maintenance, reliability, and handling are important yet harder to measure, report on and compare. As a result, weight often comes to the fore at the expense of the others. Other examples might include: Perhaps your hiring time is down, but how is the fit of the people you’re bringing in? Maybe more people are visiting your website, but they aren’t the right people for your service. We can calculate a country’s GDP, but GDP doesn’t account for human labour without a monetary transaction—like a home-cooked meal—and vital work done by nature, like filtering water, sequestering carbon, or lifting spirits. If food in a can gives you all the nutrients you need, what are you missing by skipping family meals? David Epstein, in his book Range, describes the highly quantitative culture at NASA at the time of the Challenger Space shuttle disaster: "NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: 'In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.'" "The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called “the original technical culture” in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted." "At NASA, accepting a qualitative argument was like being told to forget you are an engineer." While engineers had reservations about the safety of the launch, without quantitative data to support their views, the launch proceeded with fatal consequences. A commonly cited example of the McNamara Fallacy is the US military's approach to measuring progress in the Vietnam War. The McNamara Fallacy and the Vietnam War As the US Secretary of Defense from 1961–1968, McNamara employed similar techniques to those he had used successfully in business contexts to assess the progress of the war in Vietnam. If wars were won by inflicting damage on the enemy, then metrics measuring the damage inflicted should be decent proxies. In particular, assessing body count evolved to be the primary measure of progress. Reliance on purely quantitative metrics had significant shortcomings. In this context, enemy body count was more easily quantified than their morale, political support, or resolve to defend. Because of the interest in this measure, many officers believed that it was also often inflated (see Goodhart’s Law and Campbell’s Law below). Measuring the tons of explosives dropped is easier than measuring the reduction in capabilities they caused. Knowing the number of troops you have is easier to measure than the abilities of those troops. According to the numbers, the U.S. was winning the war, yet it failed to overcome the resistance of North Vietnam. Related Ideas to The McNamara Fallacy An over-reliance on quantitative metrics quickly leads to several other related problems to deal with: Goodhart’s Law When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, assessing the progress of war on the numbers of enemy dead may lead to increased killing to inflate numbers. Campbell’s Law The more a metric counts for real decisions, the greater the pressure for corruption, and the more it distorts the situation it’s intended to measure. For example, if reducing crime rates matters for law enforcement jobs, it creates an incentive to under-report cases or downgrade crimes. The Streetlight Effect Looking where it’s easiest to look, rather than where it matters. Also known as the drunkard’s search or looking under the lamppost, the Streetlight Effect is named after the economists’ joke of a person scrabbling on the ground for their car keys under a street light. When asked where they lost them, the person says they dropped them “over there,” but the light’s much better over here. For example, optimising an existing product because it is known and does well, rather than working on an uncertain new product. You Get What you Measure The instrument you use to measure affects what you see. “For example, in school it is easy to measure training and hard to measure education, and hence you tend to see on final exams an emphasis on the training part and a great neglect of the education part.”—Richard Hamming The Cobra Effect When an implemented policy backfires causing the opposite of the intended outcome. Named after a British attempt to reduce cobras in Delhi by introducing a bounty on dead cobras. Seeing the lucrative bounty, people started farming cobras thereby increasing their numbers. For example, the Streisand Effect is a well-documented case of a cobra effect when Barbara Streisand tried to suppress images of the coast that included her house. The attention drawn to her attempts to suppress the images brought thousands of people to look at them who otherwise would never have considered it. And all of these are examples of the broader Law of Unintended Consequences, which comes from trying to regulate a complex system with a simple system. More Related Ideas to The McNamara Fallacy If the ideas above aren’t enough, you might also see: In theory, practice is the same as theory, but not in practice All models are wrong but some are useful Reliability vs validity: You can hit the target but miss the point. Analytics maturity What gets measured gets better The map is not the territory (no sketch!) For a super discussion on the measurement of all sorts of things, including acute (being run over by a bus) and chronic risks (smoking), I recommend the fun podcast episode: Microlives & The Art of Uncertainty with Sir David Spiegelhalter The article about bike weight is: The McNamara Fallacy and Bikes by Peter Verdone Daniel Yankelovich, who named the McNamara Fallacy, stressed no disrespect to “one of our most distinguished citizens,” Robert McNamara, “a brilliant and dedicated man who brings a vital intensity to bear on his work.” Some of the complexities of the war and McNamara are covered in the Academy Award-winning documentary The Fog of War, which makes fascinating and, at times, uncomfortable viewing. ( Text just to aid search: Mc Namara )The McNamara Fallacy is a belief in easy-to-measure quantitative metrics at the expense of ignoring hard-to-measure qualitative factors. Robert McNamara was president of Ford Motor Company and later the Secretary of Defense for the USA during the war in Vietnam. He was highly intelligent and excelled at dealing with data and using it to inform strategy. Coined by social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, the McNamara Fallacy, also called the Quantitative Fallacy, involves: Prioritising easier-to-measure quantitative metrics and Disregarding hard-to-measure qualitative metrics as unimportant The fallacy can progress as follows: Measure what can be measured Disregard what we can’t measure Assume what cannot be measured is not important Conclude that what can’t be measured doesn’t exist In the words of Yankelovich: “The fallacy is: If you’re confronted by a complex problem that is full of intangibles, you decide to measure only those aspects of the problem that lend themselves to easy quantification, either because you find other aspects difficult to measure or because you assume that they can’t be very important or don’t even exist.” … “It is a short, fatal step from the statement, ‘There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can’t put on our computers,’ to the statement, ‘Let’s measure what we can and forget about the intangibles.’” Yankelovich cites working with Ford during McNamara’s time and sharing research that included both quantitative and qualitative factors. As the research was assessed, the qualitative data on the meanings people gave to small cars were discarded, and the less significant quantitative and demographic data were retained. Examples of the McNamara Fallacy I first learned about the fallacy from a reader’s article about one of the easiest to measure aspects of a bike: its weight. All things being equal, we’d probably prefer a lighter bike, but other aspects like maintenance, reliability, and handling are important yet harder to measure, report on and compare. As a result, weight often comes to the fore at the expense of the others. Other examples might include: Perhaps your hiring time is down, but how is the fit of the people you’re bringing in? Maybe more people are visiting your website, but they aren’t the right people for your service. We can calculate a country’s GDP, but GDP doesn’t account for human labour without a monetary transaction—like a home-cooked meal—and vital work done by nature, like filtering water, sequestering carbon, or lifting spirits. If food in a can gives you all the nutrients you need, what are you missing by skipping family meals? David Epstein, in his book Range, describes the highly quantitative culture at NASA at the time of the Challenger Space shuttle disaster: "NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: 'In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.'" "The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called “the original technical culture” in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted." "At NASA, accepting a qualitative argument was like being told to forget you are an engineer." While engineers had reservations about the safety of the launch, without quantitative data to support their views, the launch proceeded with fatal consequences. A commonly cited example of the McNamara Fallacy is the US military's approach to measuring progress in the Vietnam War. The McNamara Fallacy and the Vietnam War As the US Secretary of Defense from 1961–1968, McNamara employed similar techniques to those he had used successfully in business contexts to assess the progress of the war in Vietnam. If wars were won by inflicting damage on the enemy, then metrics measuring the damage inflicted should be decent proxies. In particular, assessing body count evolved to be the primary measure of progress. Reliance on purely quantitative metrics had significant shortcomings. In this context, enemy body count was more easily quantified than their morale, political support, or resolve to defend. Because of the interest in this measure, many officers believed that it was also often inflated (see Goodhart’s Law and Campbell’s Law below). Measuring the tons of explosives dropped is easier than measuring the reduction in capabilities they caused. Knowing the number of troops you have is easier to measure than the abilities of those troops. According to the numbers, the U.S. was winning the war, yet it failed to overcome the resistance of North Vietnam. Related Ideas to The McNamara Fallacy An over-reliance on quantitative metrics quickly leads to several other related problems to deal with: Goodhart’s Law When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, assessing the progress of war on the numbers of enemy dead may lead to increased killing to inflate numbers. Campbell’s Law The more a metric counts for real decisions, the greater the pressure for corruption, and the more it distorts the situation it’s intended to measure. For example, if reducing crime rates matters for law enforcement jobs, it creates an incentive to under-report cases or downgrade crimes. The Streetlight Effect Looking where it’s easiest to look, rather than where it matters. Also known as the drunkard’s search or looking under the lamppost, the Streetlight Effect is named after the economists’ joke of a person scrabbling on the ground for their car keys under a street light. When asked where they lost them, the person says they dropped them “over there,” but the light’s much better over here. For example, optimising an existing product because it is known and does well, rather than working on an uncertain new product. You Get What you Measure The instrument you use to measure affects what you see. “For example, in school it is easy to measure training and hard to measure education, and hence you tend to see on final exams an emphasis on the training part and a great neglect of the education part.”—Richard Hamming The Cobra Effect When an implemented policy backfires causing the opposite of the intended outcome. Named after a British attempt to reduce cobras in Delhi by introducing a bounty on dead cobras. Seeing the lucrative bounty, people started farming cobras thereby increasing their numbers. For example, the Streisand Effect is a well-documented case of a cobra effect when Barbara Streisand tried to suppress images of the coast that included her house. The attention drawn to her attempts to suppress the images brought thousands of people to look at them who otherwise would never have considered it. And all of these are examples of the broader Law of Unintended Consequences, which comes from trying to regulate a complex system with a simple system. More Related Ideas to The McNamara Fallacy If the ideas above aren’t enough, you might also see: In theory, practice is the same as theory, but not in practice All models are wrong but some are useful Reliability vs validity: You can hit the target but miss the point. Analytics maturity What gets measured gets better The map is not the territory (no sketch!) For a super discussion on the measurement of all sorts of things, including acute (being run over by a bus) and chronic risks (smoking), I recommend the fun podcast episode: Microlives & The Art of Uncertainty with Sir David Spiegelhalter The article about bike weight is: The McNamara Fallacy and Bikes by Peter Verdone Daniel Yankelovich, who named the McNamara Fallacy, stressed no disrespect to “one of our most distinguished citizens,” Robert McNamara, “a brilliant and dedicated man who brings a vital intensity to bear on his work.” Some of the complexities of the war and McNamara are covered in the Academy Award-winning documentary The Fog of War, which makes fascinating and, at times, uncomfortable viewing. ( Text just to aid search: Mc Namara )

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