Daniel Schmidt on LinkedIn: "Flat metrics dashboards" are profoundly limited. After companies adopt… | 14 comments

Here’s the primary problem with Measurement: you can measure a million different things. Measure too much, and you’ll inevitably suffer from the Cognitive Scope Limitation, drowning in a sea of meaningless data. Some Measurements are more important than others: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are Measurements of the critical parts of a System.

The folks who create dashboards live in a silo. They rarely go out and collect enough tribal knowledge to fully grasp the organizational actions behind the trends and patterns observed in the data being reported.

Often dashboard creators are “outsiders” such as consultants, and they don’t have deep practitioner experience for understanding the entrenched issues within the company, such as the previous three issues. Therefore, they make common mistakes that lead to unactionable dashboards and a loss of credibility.

evidence suggests that piling on more data often hurts decision quality:

1. Too much choice stalls action. In the famous "jam study," shoppers presented with 24 flavors bought jam 3 percent of the time, while those offered just six flavors purchased 30 percent of the time—a 10-fold jump.


2. Information overload erodes well-being. Two-thirds of

In actual practice, we find that many very successful companies do not have readily available process metrics for the as-is state, for example, process costs, process cycle times, and process effectiveness measures. That said, we find that experienced business