The connection on the Zoom call flickered for the 12th time in an hour, rendering the face of the young associate in London into a series of jagged, frozen squares. He was lean, perhaps 22 years old, wearing a crisp vest and sitting in a room that likely smelled of filtered air and expensive cologne. On the other end of the line, in a small office in Jakarta, the humidity was so heavy it felt like a physical weight against the lungs. Rain was hammering against the corrugated metal roof-a sound so violent it nearly drowned out the digital ping of a missed notification. The associate was pointing at a cell in a spreadsheet, his voice tiny and metallic through the speakers, asking why the site preparation for the new logistics hub was 42 days behind schedule. He cited a global average for land clearing. He mentioned that the numbers didn’t align with the ‘standard volatility’ models his firm used for emerging markets.

I watched the local developer on the Jakarta side, a man who had built 32 major structures across the archipelago, slowly rub his temples. He tried to explain that ‘volatility’ isn’t a percentage you add to a cell; it is the fact that when the monsoon hits this specific district, the main arterial road doesn’t just get congested-it disappears. It becomes a river where 22-year-old trucks sink to their axles. The associate shook his head. He didn’t see a river. He saw a ‘logistical bottleneck’ that needed to be optimized. This is the geographic arrogance of modern funding: the belief that if the math is clean, the mud doesn’t matter.

It reminds me of the afternoon I spent alphabetizing my spice rack. I had this sudden, desperate need for order. I put the Anise next to the Allspice and the Cumin next to the Coriander. For about 12 minutes, I felt like the master of my kitchen, a god of organized flavor. But then I tried to actually cook a meal, and the logic fell apart. I needed heat, I needed salt, I needed the things that were now buried under a rigid alphabetical system that ignored how flavors actually interact in a pan. We do the same thing with capital. We organize it in London or New York according to ‘risk profiles’ and ‘yield curves,’ ignoring the fact that a spreadsheet in a temperate climate is a poor map for a construction site in the tropics. We alphabetize the spice rack while the kitchen is on fire.

The Arrogance of Data

Jax K., a carnival ride inspector I met years ago during a particularly humid summer in Ohio, once told me that you can tell a bad engineer by how much they trust their blueprints. Jax had spent 32 years crawling under Tilt-A-Whirls and Ferris wheels. He knew that a ride bolted onto a concrete pad in Nevada would behave entirely differently than the same ride set up on a muddy fairground in the Midwest. ‘The metal remembers the weather,’ he used to say. He’d seen bolts shear off not because of a lack of maintenance, but because the ground breathed in a way the manufacturer hadn’t accounted for. Investors today are like the engineers Jax hated. They think a project in Ghana is just a project in Kent with a higher interest rate. They don’t realize the ground in Accra breathes differently.

This arrogance isn’t just a failure of imagination; it’s a failure of data. The associate in London sees the Jakarta traffic as a data point-a 32% delay factor. He doesn’t see the ‘macet’, the soul-crushing, heat-radiating gridlock where motorbikes weave through the gaps like water through a sieve. He doesn’t understand that in some parts of the world, a ‘contract’ is merely the beginning of a conversation, and a ‘deadline’ is a polite suggestion dependent on the current state of the local power grid. When you try to force these realities into a rigid Western financial model, the model breaks. Or worse, the project fails, and the investor blames ‘local incompetence’ instead of their own blindness.

I’ve seen this play out in the energy sector too. A group of analysts will sit in a glass-walled room and project the ROI of a solar farm in Kenya based on average sunshine hours. They’ll calculate the efficiency of the panels down to the 2nd decimal point. But they won’t account for the 42 different local land-use agreements that need to be negotiated by hand, over tea, with people who couldn’t care less about a London firm’s quarterly reporting cycle. They ignore the political reality that a bridge isn’t just a piece of infrastructure; it’s a symbol of power that can be given or taken away based on a handshake that happened 12 years ago.

There is a profound danger in the illusion of global similarity. We’ve built a financial system that prizes scale over specificity. We want things to be ‘replicable.’ If a funding model works for a warehouse in Rotterdam, we want to copy and paste it into a shipping terminal in Surabaya. But the world isn’t a copy-paste environment. It is a messy, beautiful, contradictory place where the most important variables are often the ones you can’t see on a screen. True expertise isn’t knowing how to build a spreadsheet; it’s knowing when to throw the spreadsheet away and listen to the person standing in the rain.

“

The map is not the territory, and the spreadsheet is not the soil.

“

I often find myself arguing against the very tools I use. I like spreadsheets. I like the way the numbers line up in neat rows of 12. But I’ve learned to be wary of the comfort they provide. It is a seductive lie to believe that the world is quantifiable. We use these tools to shield ourselves from the chaos of reality. If we can put a number on the risk, we feel like we’ve conquered it. But you can’t conquer a monsoon with a formula. You can only prepare for it. You can only build structures-both physical and financial-that are flexible enough to bend when the wind hits 82 miles per hour.

I remember a project in a coastal region of Africa where the investors were insistent on using a specific type of high-grade steel. It looked great on the procurement list. It met all the international standards. But within 22 months, the salt air had eaten through it like acid. The local engineers had suggested a different, cheaper composite that was uglier but more resilient. The London office overruled them because the composite wasn’t in their approved ‘global materials’ database. They spent $102 million on a facility that started falling apart before the ribbon-cutting ceremony. They were so focused on being right according to the book that they forgot to look at the ocean.

Thick Data vs. Thin Information

This is the core of the frustration. It’s the feeling of being gaslit by a screen. You are standing in the mud, smelling the ozone in the air, knowing that the world is about to shift, and someone 10,000 miles away is telling you that according to the 2nd-quarter projections, it should be sunny. It’s an exhausting way to do business. It creates a friction that burns through money and morale. We need a return to ‘thick’ data-information that is rich in context, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a Y-axis. We need to value the inspector like Jax K., who can tell if a weld is going to hold just by the sound it makes when you tap it with a hammer.

Maybe the problem is that we’ve replaced wisdom with information. Information is cheap. It’s everywhere. You can get the weather forecast for Jakarta on your phone in 2 seconds. But wisdom is knowing that the forecast doesn’t matter if the drainage system in the city hasn’t been cleaned since ’82. Wisdom is knowing that the human element is the only thing that actually keeps a project on track. If the people on the ground don’t trust the people in the office, no amount of ‘incentive structures’ or ‘penalty clauses’ will make the work happen. You can’t code for trust.

In the end, the associate in London finally sighed and closed his laptop. He looked tired. The jagged squares of his face vanished, replaced by a smooth, high-definition image for a brief moment before the call dropped entirely. He didn’t get his answer. He didn’t get his 42-day delay explained away. He just went back to his life in a city where the trains mostly run on time and the rain is a minor inconvenience that requires an umbrella, not a boat. Meanwhile, in Jakarta, the developer put on his boots and walked out into the flood. He had a project to save. He knew the numbers were wrong, but he also knew the ground was still there, waiting for someone who understood how to build on it. If we are going to fund the future of the world, we have to stop looking at it through a straw. We have to be willing to get our feet wet, to smell the dampness, and to realize that the most important thing in any spreadsheet is the stuff that isn’t there.