This principle helps explain why people behave differently from what pure logic would predict.
More quotesThe spreadsheet has never met a customer. This does not stop it becoming Employee of the Month.
Numbers win arguments because they arrive wearing little uniforms of precision. A support centre lowers call time while customers ring back twice. Marketing delivers the lead target by purchasing names sales would cross the road to avoid. The service reports excellent uptime while every important page moves like treacle. Green dashboard. Furious humans. Nobody invites the humans to the quarterly review because their experience is not in the agreed data model.
The cure is not intuition. Intuition is perfectly capable of producing political, biased nonsense without opening Excel. The cure is to make the number answer to the purpose. Pair call duration with resolution and repeat contact. Pair lead volume with accepted pipeline. Pair uptime with latency when customers actually need the service.
Every important metric deserves a warning label:
What does it miss? How could a clever person improve it while making the business worse?
If that question causes nervous laughter, excellent—the metric has finally met reality. Measurement is an instrument, not a constitution. The moment the proxy becomes the mission, the organisation starts sacrificing outcomes to keep the cells green today.