What a Dashboard Cannot See
Some things are unmeasured because nobody bothered. These are unmeasured because they cannot be instrumented, and pretending otherwise produces a worse number rather than a better decision. For a related reference, see further details.
The seven
Whether somebody is being carried. A team member whose work is quietly absorbed by two colleagues shows normal output and normal activity.
Whether the good people are disengaging. Disengagement precedes departure by months and looks identical to competence in every metric — the work still arrives, on time, without the extra.
Whether a decision was right. Systems record that a decision was made and never whether it was any good.
Whether the work is interesting. The single largest factor in whether skilled people stay somewhere, and it has no field.
Whether a manager is trusted. The largest controllable factor in retention and entirely invisible.
Whether a problem is being sat on. The thing psychological safety exists to prevent, and by construction it leaves no trace until it emerges.
And whether somebody has stopped learning, which they will notice about a year before anybody else does.
Why these resist measurement
They are states rather than events.
Systems capture events — a commit, a ticket, a login, a swipe. A state has to be asked about or observed, and neither produces a row in a database.
And several are only knowable by the person themselves, which means the measurement is a question and the answer depends on whether it is safe to give.
How each becomes visible
By asking, in a setting where the answer is safe. Which is what the one-to-one is for, and why its cancellation rate matters.
By noticing what changed. Not the level, the change: somebody who stopped volunteering, stopped arguing, stopped staying for the interesting part.
And by the slow measurements, which are proxies rather than the thing itself and are the best available substitute.
The temptation to instrument them anyway
Every one of the seven has a product claiming to measure it.
Sentiment analysis on messages. Engagement scores. Collaboration network graphs.
These measure something — usually message volume and who talks to whom — and attach the name of the unmeasurable thing to it. The precision arrives, the accuracy does not, and the organisation now believes it has covered the gap.
A known blind spot is safer than a false reading, which is the whole argument for this page existing.
What to do about it
Write the seven down and accept them as unmeasured.
Assign them to attention rather than to instrumentation. A manager whose job explicitly includes noticing these is doing something different from one reviewing a dashboard.
And check the proxies against outcomes, because a proxy that does not move with departures is not a proxy for anything.
The short version
- Seven unmeasurables: somebody being carried, good people disengaging, whether a decision was right, whether work is interesting, whether a manager is trusted, whether a problem is being sat on, and whether somebody stopped learning
- They resist measurement because they are states rather than events, and systems capture events
- Several are only knowable by the person, so the measurement is a question whose answer depends on safety
- They become visible by asking where the answer is safe, by noticing what changed rather than the level, and through slow proxies
- Every one has a product claiming to measure it, which measures message volume and attaches the name of the real thing
- A known blind spot is safer than a false reading, and the seven belong to attention rather than instrumentation
For additional context on this topic, see DPReview.