The most efficient way to ensure a task is performed poorly is to measure how quickly it is completed.
We have spent several decades laboring under the delusion that visibility into a process is synonymous with control over it. It is not. Visibility is merely an invitation to the performer to adjust the performance for the observer. When the observer is a digital dashboard mounted on a wall, glowing with the sterile authority of a high-definition screen, the distortion is immediate and absolute.
A wrong number call woke me up at this morning. The caller was looking for a man named Hector and sounded disappointed when I told him he had the wrong Peter. I sat in my kitchen in the pre-dawn silence, the phone still radiating a faint heat against my palm, and thought about how Hector probably doesn’t have people calling him at five in the morning to discuss his Key Performance Indicators.
I, however, spend my days looking at the wreckage left behind when a spreadsheet tries to manage a human being. In a professional environment, there is a quiet, informal sense of what it means to do a job well. It is a texture, not a number. It is the way a mechanic listens to the specific rattle of a valve, or the way a support agent realizes that the person on the other end of the phone isn’t actually confused about their password, but is lonely and needs three extra minutes of conversation.
This informal standard is what keeps organizations alive. It is the soul of the work. But because it cannot be graphed, leadership eventually decides it does not exist.
They install a dashboard.
The office I visited last month was a testament to this transition. It was located on the fourth floor of a glass-fronted building that smelled of industrial-grade lavender and recycled air. There were twenty-four workstations arranged in four rows. Each desk was equipped with a Dell Latitude laptop, a secondary 24-inch monitor, a Jabra noise-canceling headset, and a ergonomic mouse pad with a gel wrist rest.
On the back wall, a 75-inch Samsung television displayed the department’s real-time metrics. There were four columns on the screen: Average Handle Time, Tickets Resolved, Customer Satisfaction Score, and Pending Status.
Average Handle Time
Under 4m
At 9:14 AM, the Average Handle Time bar was shaded a vibrant, artificial lime green.
Before the dashboard arrived, the people in that room took pride in solving problems. If a member had a complex issue with an account, the agent would stay on the line until the friction was gone. They knew the members by name. They understood the context of the frustration. But the dashboard does not see context; it only sees the ticking of the clock. Within three weeks of the screen’s installation, the culture of problem-solving had been replaced by a culture of clock-watching.
The agents developed a series of maneuvers designed to keep the dashboard green. They learned that if they put a caller on hold for exactly twenty-eight seconds and then returned, the timer for “Active Engagement” would sometimes reset in the legacy software. They learned that “Resolving” a ticket and immediately opening a “Follow-up” ticket counted as two resolutions on the board, even if the problem remained exactly where it started. They were no longer working for the members; they were working for the television on the wall.
In retail theft prevention, we call this the “Empty Box Syndrome.” When I am auditing a high-shrinkage department, I don’t look at the reports first. I look at the physical reality. If a manager is evaluated solely on the number of “apprehensions” or “stops” they record each month, they will stop looking for the professional shoplifting rings that actually hurt the bottom line.
Those professionals are difficult to catch and involve a high risk of failure. Instead, the manager will spend their time catching teenagers who are clumsy and obvious. The metric for “Apprehensions” goes up, the dashboard turns green, and the actual financial loss-the shrinkage-continues to climb because the real thieves are being ignored.
Apprehension Metric
Actual Shrinkage
Humans are remarkably adept at optimizing for the symbol while discarding the substance.
The Tedium of Truth
The process of a retail audit is intentionally tedious to avoid this trap. It involves a manual count of every single unit of a high-value SKU, such as infant formula or razor blades, and comparing that physical count to the point-of-sale logs from the previous . We use a handheld Zebra scanner and a paper ledger. We check the seals on the loading dock doors. We verify the time-stamps on the NVR system.
This work cannot be summarized in a single “Performance Score” because the moment you try to simplify it, you give the person being measured a way to cheat. The dashboard creators believe they are providing clarity. In reality, they are providing a target. Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The tragedy is that the informal sense of a job well done is fragile. Once you tell an employee that their value is defined by a 3.8-minute phone call, you have killed their permission to be excellent. You have told them that the “right” thing to do is whatever makes the graph move in the desired direction. The internal moral compass is replaced by a digital needle.
I watched Sarah, an agent who had been with the company for , handle a call at . She had a photograph of a Golden Retriever taped to her monitor and a small succulent in a ceramic pot on her desk. The caller was an elderly man who was struggling to navigate a new security update.
Sarah’s eyes kept darting to the dashboard on the wall. At the three-minute mark, the bar next to her name turned yellow. At three minutes and forty-five seconds, it began to flash a soft, menacing red.
Sarah’s tone changed. She stopped asking questions and started giving commands. She spoke faster. She cut the man off mid-sentence to provide a “standard resolution path.” At four minutes and two seconds, she closed the call. She hadn’t solved his problem-he was still locked out of his account-but she had preserved her average. She looked at the screen, saw the red bar turn back to green, and let out a breath she had been holding.
The dashboard was happy. The member was frustrated. The company was blind. This is the hidden cost of the rational measure. It displaces human judgment. In sectors where trust and longevity are the actual products being sold, this trade-off is catastrophic.
The Standard of Longevity
Longevity isn’t a fluke; it’s the result of resisting the urge to game the system for short-term “green” metrics. For instance, in the world of online entertainment and licensed gaming, a brand like gclubfun has remained operational since precisely because they operate under a different set of standards.
When you are broadcasting live-dealer sessions from a physical venue in Poipet, transparency isn’t a metric on a dashboard; it is the physical reality of the business. You cannot “game” a live stream that is being watched by thousands of people in real-time. The fairness is baked into the process, not added as a KPI after the fact.
When a platform survives for in a regulated environment, it is because they have understood that the “informal” sense of doing right by the member is actually the most important asset they have. They don’t need a dashboard to tell them to be honest; the honesty is the reason the doors are still open twenty years later.
But back in that lavender-scented office on the fourth floor, the leadership was thrilled. They showed me a PowerPoint deck that demonstrated an 18% increase in “Ticket Velocity.” They were very proud of the velocity. I asked them if they had measured how many of those tickets resulted in a second call within . They hadn’t. That wasn’t on the dashboard.
The dashboard had become the master. It was no longer a tool for understanding the business; it was the business itself.
The reality of the members’ experience had been relegated to a footnote, a ghost in the machine that occasionally made the numbers look messy. We see this everywhere now. In hospitals, where doctors are measured on “patient throughput” rather than health outcomes. In schools, where teachers are measured on standardized test scores rather than a student’s ability to think.
In my own field of theft prevention, where “case counts” are often prioritized over actual inventory accuracy. We are measuring the shadow and wondering why the light feels so dim. It is difficult to go back once the dashboard is in place. It requires a level of courage that most modern managers lack.
It requires admitting that you don’t actually know everything that is happening in your department. It requires trusting that if you hire good people and give them the resources they need, they will do the right thing because they have a professional soul, not because a screen is flashing red at them.
I left that office at . The dashboard showed that the team had resolved 412 tickets that day. According to the screen, it was a wildly successful Tuesday. But as I walked to my car, I saw three of the agents standing near the smoking area.
They weren’t talking about their successes. They were talking about how to “buffer” their call times tomorrow by staying in the “After-Call Work” status for an extra to avoid getting back-to-back difficult queries. The lime-green bar on the screen became more real to the supervisor than the frustrated human voice on the other end of the headset.
They were gaming the gauge. They had been turned into mathematicians of their own misery. They had been given a target, and they were hitting it with surgical precision, leaving the actual job to bleed out on the floor.
I drove home and thought about that 5 AM phone call. Hector, wherever he is, probably doesn’t care about Ticket Velocity. He probably just wants someone to pick up the phone and know who he is.
We have built a world that is perfectly optimized for the wrong things, and we are surprised when the results feel hollow. We keep looking for the truth in the numbers, forgetting that a number is just a letter that forgot how to tell a story. If you want to know how a business is really doing, turn off the screen and go talk to the people who are tired of looking at it. They’ll tell you the truth, but it won’t be in green.
End of report. Physical count verified.
