Dashboards are useful because they compress a large amount of activity into an abstraction, allowing leaders to understand quickly how a business is doing.
Revenue. Pipeline. Attrition. Customer satisfaction. Conversion. Productivity. Engagement.
Without this compression, leaders would be drowning in detail. And as a leader, it is a sinking feeling when you know something bad is happening in the organisation, but you just don’t know what yet. This may explain why some leaders like looking at dashboards.
There is comfort in certainty. A dashboard makes a complicated organisation feel more knowable.
But a dashboard is not the business. It is a representation of the business, built from what we have decided is worth measuring and what we are able to measure reasonably well. And organisations naturally give greater weight to standardised metrics, not necessarily because they matter more, but because they are easier to compare, explain and defend.
And every leader knows the inherent safety in being seen as data- or evidence-driven rather than gut-driven. This tips the balance in favour of what is measurable: it is easier to point to, easier to justify after the fact, and easier to defend as objective rather than emotional. What is harder to measure often carries more personal risk for the person raising it.
Over time, this reinforces two behaviours. First, people wait until they have enough measurable evidence before raising a concern, which means early signals are more easily buried. Second, measurable things begin to acquire more authority than they deserve.
What gets lost in the abstraction
And here lies the challenge: some things that matter most are difficult to observe directly. For example, culture. So, we measure its proxies like engagement, attrition, regrettable exits, internal mobility, manager effectiveness and HR folk’s favourite, eNPS.
Measurement gives us evidence of what is happening. But sometimes, two contradictory realities can exist at the same time. A respectable engagement score can coexist with a culture where people have quietly learnt that disagreeing with management is career-limiting. As I described in an earlier essay, people can also learn to game the numbers based on how the organisation rewards or punishes certain behaviours.
Attrition can be low because employees are well paid, or have limited alternatives to move, or are simply waiting for the right moment to hand in their resignation letters.
So, the numbers can be accurate but the interpretation of what they mean for the culture may not be.
The same problem appears elsewhere. Customer satisfaction gets reduced to NPS, CSAT and renewal rates, even though loyalty, trust and willingness to choose you again are more consequential to revenue.
Capability development has the same problem.
HR reports training hours, course completion, certification and training satisfaction because they are easy to count, but do they tell us whether actual capability shows up where it is needed most?
Do employees ask better questions? Are problems recognised earlier? Would they make better decisions when confronted with the same situation?
These don’t fit neatly on a dashboard; we tend to measure what is easiest to observe and gradually mistake the proxy for the outcome itself. What is easiest to see can quietly acquire more authority than what is harder to see. One reason is that when something is measurable, it is also easier to govern and therefore gets managed more closely. Any improvements are visible, rewarded and reinforced. Conversely, anything that is hard to measure becomes harder to operationalise, and therefore easier to neglect.
This creates a feedback loop. What is visible gets managed, what gets managed improves, and those improvements reinforce our confidence in the dashboard. Meanwhile, the parts of the business that are harder to see may be deteriorating outside the frame.
So, the danger is not only that the dashboard is a compression of the business. It can also shape which parts of the business receive attention. And this is where it becomes dangerous.
So, what should leaders do?
I recall a picture of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where a remarkable number of officials were positioned along the finish line, watching the athletes from slightly different positions.
What makes this picture interesting is that it was not an Olympics without technology. In fact, electronic timing and photo-finish systems were already in use. Human timekeepers were part of the measurement system alongside them.
We probably look at this picture now and find it amusing because of how cumbersome it is. But notice what is happening here: they were not relying on one source of information to carry the entire burden of determining what happened.
There is wisdom here that leaders could borrow.
By design, dashboards remove details. Sometimes those details could signal something significant. So, the idea is to put the right kind of details back and look at the picture again.
Listen to customer calls. Sit in on a sales review. Talk to operations people who must work around the processes every day. Ask new employees what they found surprising after three months in the organisation. The point is for leaders to maintain some contact with what is happening on the ground and contrast that with what the dashboard is saying. When the stories don’t fit the average, that is often the signal to look closer.
Many things that matter take time to reveal themselves. Systems often absorb small changes before the outcome becomes visible downstream. Culture deteriorates before the best people leave. Capability improves before financial results catch up.
That means leaders need both leading and lagging indicators.
If we believe a stronger onboarding programme will improve employee performance, we should eventually ask whether it did. If we generate a strong pipeline, we should follow it through to revenue and ask how much of it converted, and how quickly.
The dashboard is useful because it simplifies the business. Leaders get into trouble when they forget what has been simplified away.
The job is not to have perfect numbers. It is to know what the numbers can tell you, what they cannot, and where you still need to look for yourself. For me, a little scepticism when everything is overly green or overly red is a good place to start.
Further reading
- Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton, “The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance” — a useful foundation for thinking about why no single set of measures can tell leaders enough about organisational performance, and why different perspectives need to be considered together.
- Andrew Likierman, “The Five Traps of Performance Measurement” — a practical look at how apparently sensible metrics can mislead leaders when organisations confuse what is easy to measure with what actually matters.
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State — a much broader exploration of what happens when complex realities are simplified so they can be made legible and manageable. Particularly relevant to the question of what gets lost when organisations try to make complicated systems easier to see and govern.