Two items out of more than five hundred. Twenty minutes on the phone, and the manager still couldn't see them.
Years ago, before I ran my own companies, I was a department head in a large company. At the end of each year my department had to help check the books, and because I've always had an eye for figures that don't add up, the stock checks landed on my desk. It wasn't in my contract. One of them was for a site three hundred kilometres away. I wasn't the site manager's boss, but my boss was his boss's boss, and he knew it. It was all online: the same inventory, the same list, open on my screen and on his at the same time. More than five hundred products, line by line.
Two of them didn't match.
So I rang him. I told him which two. He scrolled, and said he couldn't see a problem. I read him the codes. He still couldn't see it. I read him the quantities, the figures on the system against the figures he'd reported. Nothing. Twenty minutes of "where exactly?", "I've got it in front of me and it looks fine", "are you sure you're on the right page?".
At some point I stopped explaining. I took a screenshot of the list, drew a red circle around each of the two lines, put an arrow next to each one, and sent it to him.
He still said he couldn't see it.
So I told him, calmly, that if the figures didn't match, the difference would be charged to him.
He found it immediately. Both lines. He even knew why they were wrong.
That's when I understood what the twenty minutes had actually been. He'd seen the two lines the whole time. We were never looking at the same thing differently. He was hoping I'd get tired of it, give up, and leave his mistakes uncorrected.
The screenshot had taken away his excuse. Once two red circles are sitting on his screen, "I can't see it" stops being a misunderstanding and becomes a choice.
"I can't see it" is a misunderstanding until you circle it. After that, it's a choice.
Think about how much of your week goes on the same conversation. A client who can't see the line on the invoice. A supplier who can't find the error in the delivery note. A colleague who can't spot the wrong figure in the spreadsheet. A developer who can't reproduce the bug. Some of them genuinely can't. Some of them are hoping you'll stop asking.
Either way, describing it doesn't work. "Third column, about halfway down, the one with the code that starts with 4" is twenty minutes on the phone. A picture with a red circle is five seconds, and it works on both kinds of people. The honest one sees it straight away. The other one has run out of places to hide.
So wherever I've run things since, the rule has been simple: don't describe a problem on a screen. Show it. Capture it, circle it, send it. Then the conversation is about fixing it, not about whether it exists.
If you have to explain where the mistake is, you've already lost twenty minutes. Circle it.