The Tyranny of Metrics

The modern company is drowning in numbers and starving for understanding.

Everywhere you look there are dashboards, KPIs, OKRs, scorecards, leaderboards. Every initiative has a target. Every team has a chart to point at. Somewhere along the way, “show me the data” stopped being a good instinct and turned into a reflexive shield against thinking.

That is the tyranny of metrics. It looks rigorous. It feels safe. And it quietly wrecks real progress.

When the metric becomes the mission

You see it in support first.

Someone decides that “average handle time” is the north star. Suddenly reps are nudged to move faster. Scripts get tighter. Calls get shorter. Customers still feel confused, but the clock looks great. A week later the same customers open new tickets for the same issues. The dashboard is green. The experience is garbage.

Engineering is no better. Leadership wants “more tickets closed” per sprint, so complex work is carved into tiny slivers. People cherry pick low effort tasks to hit their numbers. Root cause work gets pushed out because it is messy and hard to quantify. Velocity charts look pretty all while codebase drifts into a maze.

Ops is told to hit “SOP adherence” targets. So people click through checklists they do not trust, then fix everything in shadow channels. Email threads, DMs, private docs. Compliance reports say the system works. The actual system is a patchwork of workarounds.

This is not an accident. When the metric becomes the mission, the work contorts to serve the number. You do not get better outcomes. You get better optics.

Metrics are compression, not reality

Metrics do one useful thing. They compress messy reality into something you can scan.

They do not explain why something is happening.

They do not tell you where friction lives.

They do not show you how brittle your system is when someone leaves.

Your backend systems are where this blindness costs you the most. Processes, SOPs, internal knowledge, governance, tools. None of this is linear. It is interdependent, political, full of edge cases and unwritten rules.

You can hit every SLA and still have a process that everyone secretly hates. You can show perfect completion on training and still have no one who actually understands how a critical workflow fits together. You can brag about “coverage” in your knowledge base while people build their own private wikis because they cannot find anything when it matters.

The metric does not care how you got there. It does not know how many Slack messages it took to fake a clean line on a chart.

The lie of “objective data”

The most dangerous myth inside a company is that numbers are objective and everything else is noise.

“Look, I just follow the data.” Translation: “I trust the chart more than the people living in the system.”

But every metric is a design decision. You chose:

• What counts as an event

• Where in the workflow to capture it

• How to group it

• What to ignore because it was hard to instrument

That is not neutral. It is opinion encoded as a line graph.

When leaders forget this, they start using metrics to shut down conversation. A senior IC says the process is broken. A frontline manager says the doc is unusable. The chart says cycle time is fine, so the lived reality gets overruled.

Over time, people stop bringing you problems. They start feeding the system whatever inputs will keep their metrics safe. You did not become data driven. You became easy to game.

Qualitative signal is not “soft”

The richest insight about your systems will never fit neatly into a chart.

You get it from questions like:

• Where did this process feel confusing

• When did you break the rules and why

• What did you have to ask for that should have been obvious

• What did you do because “that is just how we do it here”

This is not fluff. It is the actual behavior of your system under load.

If you dismiss qualitative input as “anecdotal,” you are admitting something ugly: you would rather be roughly wrong with a graph than roughly right with a conversation.

Real systems work comes from putting the two together. You see a spike in tickets and then you go read a sample of them. You see a dip in adherence and then you sit down with the people ignoring the SOP and ask what reality they are solving for.

Metrics tell you where to look. Qualitative insight tells you what is really happening.

Context is the difference between signal and nonsense

Take any metric in isolation and you can tell almost any story.

Ticket volume is down. Maybe you fixed root causes. Maybe customers gave up trying to contact you.

Time to resolution is up. Maybe your team is stuck. Maybe they are finally doing real, thorough work instead of slamming doors shut.

Without context, you are not reading data. You are staring at ink blots.

Context comes from walking the terrain. Running an incident review and mapping every handoff. Pulling up the actual doc people used, not the one you like to show new hires. Watching how someone navigates your internal tools while they talk out loud.

That is what breaks the spell of the dashboard. You see the gap between the system you think you have and the one people actually use.

Put metrics back where they belong

The right move is not to abandon metrics, but to demote them.

Use them as indicators, not instructions. A change in the numbers should trigger investigation, not automatic punishment or celebration. Numbers ask questions. They do not give answers.

Tie any metric review directly to system change. If you do not leave with a clearer SOP, a sharper ownership boundary, or a better piece of documentation, you probably just held a chart appreciation meeting.

Most importantly, start measuring how fast your system learns. How quickly do incidents turn into updated docs. How often do you retire or rewrite useless processes. How long does key knowledge live only in one person’s head before it gets captured.

That is the kind of structure we care about at Ushiro Labs. Not just stacked dashboards, but backend systems that actually improve, become more legible, and rely less on heroics over time.

The tyranny of metrics is not that you track too much. It is that you treat the numbers as reality instead of as clues. Break that habit and you give your organization something numbers alone will never deliver: the ability to see itself clearly and change on purpose.

From afar, always rooting for your success.

-Ushiro Labs