Available September 10, 2026

Episode 032: The Measurement Ratchet – Why Nothing You Measure Ever Leaves

DURATION: 49 minutes
HOST: Kevin Novak

FORMAT: Solo Episode

SHOW: The Human Factor Podcast

COLD OPEN

Kevin Novak: I want to start with an exercise that I’ve run with a number of leadership teams over the last few years. And I want you to play along wherever you’re watching or listening. Think about the measures that your organization runs on. The dashboards, the monthly report, the board scorecard, whatever you call it in your world. Now name one that you’ve retired in the last few years. Not just paused, not moved to a different tab, but actually retired. Somebody has actually decided that it served its purpose and said so aloud and ended it. Every time I run this, the room goes quiet. Not a defensive quiet. The quiet of people realizing in real time that they’ve built something that they can add to but they can’t subtract from.

Kevin Novak: That’s what today’s episode is going to be all about. I’ve come to think of it as a measurement ratchet. And I think it’s one of the most consequential and the least examined things happening inside organizations right now. I’m Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital. Professor at the University of Maryland, author of the book The Truth About Transformation, Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty, and Human Complexity, along with the Ideas and Innovations weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Human Factor Podcast, the show that explores the intersection of humanity, technology, and transformation, along with the psychology behind transformation success.

INTRODUCTION: WHAT SEASON 3 IS

Kevin Novak: This is season three, episode one. Welcome. So before we get into today’s episode, I want to tell you what this season is because it’s a real shift for me. If you were with me for episode 31, the season two finale in July, you heard me trace the whole arc and land on three things the season revealed. One, resistance is information, and identity is its deepest layer. Two, structure usually beats intention. And three, transformation isn’t an event. It’s a practice. It’s patience, repeated. Season three is going to take that last sentence as its assignment. Season one, well, it was about seeing the problem clearly.

Kevin Novak: Season two was about what you do once you can see it. So season three is about practice. Not an initiative, not another workshop, but a durable capability that survives after the consultant leaves and the executive sponsor changes jobs. Four threads are going to run through this season. The first, the dynamic between artificial intelligence and human beings, not as a technology topic. But as the clearest case study of the human factor that we’ve ever had. And it’s happening in real time. Next, more practitioners in the field and fewer episodes of just me. Next, I’m going to try to close the loop on measurement, which means readiness, trust, and the gap between what people say they’re committed to and what their behavior actually reveals.

Kevin Novak: Next, the pace problem, which I raised in July at the close of season two. I called it at the time the most important work of all, and two months later I still very much feel that way. Tom Serena, who has led the American Gastroenterological Association for decades, gave me the plainest version of that fourth thread in episode 30: The Long Game. The denominator of change, he said, is pace and patience, and you rarely control the pace. You know, we’re asking people to absorb more change faster than at any point in the history of organized work, with the very same nervous system that we have always had.

Kevin Novak: Today sits on measurement and pace at once, which is why it opens this third season. Because here’s the thing that I didn’t see until I started writing this episode. The ratchet is the pace problem in a completely another form. Adding is fast. Subtracting is slow. So what we measure grows at machine speed and gets reviewed at human speed, if it gets reviewed at all. Retiring measures on a regular schedule is not really a measurement exercise. It’s about pacing. It is patience, repeated in the most literal sense of that phrase. One note on this format before we start: there is a companion piece to this episode, and I made sure the two are not the same thing.

Kevin Novak: Last week’s Ideas and Innovations newsletter, issue 280, carries the written deep dive, including the history, the considerations, and a good deal more on how to put this into practice in your own organization. Same foundation, deeper work. Here is where I want to do four things: establish that none of this is new. I’m going to show you two mechanisms, one that keeps every measure alive, and one that keeps new ones arriving. I want to walk you into the room where the conversation actually happens and go through the practice step by step.

SEGMENT 1: WE HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR SEVENTY YEARS

Kevin Novak: So let me start with the first of those. That none of this is new. And I mean that more literally than you’re expecting. And I think the surprise is the point. It was to me. In 1956, a researcher named V.F. Ridgway published a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly called Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements. It runs eight pages, written in 1956, before the personal computer, before the spreadsheet, before anyone had ever seen a dashboard. Ridgway did something simple and somewhat devastating to much of the way that we think about measurement. He sorted the research on quantitative performance measurement in the three categories. Single measures, where an organization tracks one number.

Kevin Novak: Multiple measures, where it tracks several. And composite measures, where it rolls up several into an index. He found that all three produce dysfunctional behavior. Single measures push people towards goal displacement, which is really the polite term for optimizing the number instead of the thing the number stood for. Multiple measures create unresolved trade-offs. Because when everything is measured, nothing is prioritized, and the person in the middle will only have to guess. Composite measures bury the value conflict inside a weighting scheme. So the argument nobody wants to have gets settled quietly by whoever built the formula. Here’s his line, and I’d ask you to hold on to it for the next half hour or so.

Kevin Novak: Quantitative measures of performance are tools and are undoubtedly useful. But research indicates that indiscriminate use and undue confidence and reliance in them results from insufficient knowledge of the full effects and consequences. One of my favorite topics. And then further on in the same paper, this: the cure is sometimes worse than the disease. Again, that was seventy years ago. There is so much that we don’t know, or we forget, or we overlook, or we dismiss. As we go about solving problems and judging solutions, there’s a lot back there worth learning from, instead of reaching for whatever seems best in the moment, which as humans we do so far too often.

Kevin Novak: So Ridgway had all of this in 1956. What I find remarkable isn’t that he was right, it’s what happened next, which was mostly to build more measurement. And of course, a very human reaction. In 1979, the psychologist Donald Campbell published what’s now called Campbell’s Law. The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. That’s a mouthful for sure. Now, the second law, because I think it’s almost what everybody gets wrong. You may have heard the line: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Kevin Novak: It gets attributed to Charles Goodhart, and it’s called Goodhart’s Law. That sentence doesn’t appear anywhere in Goodhart’s writing. What he actually wrote in a paper he gave in 1975 on British monetary policy was that any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. And from what I learned, he wrote it as an aside, in brackets, not as a grand thesis. The sentence everybody quotes, is Marilyn Strathern’s. In 1997, writing about audit in British universities, she restated Goodhart’s idea, as another scholar, Keith Hoskin, had already labeled it. I’m being careful about this on purpose. This is an episode about numbers.

Kevin Novak: It gets separated from where they came from, and they keep circulating anyway, to the point that they get treated as fact, as actionable, and as intelligence. And then we adopt them. They become our norms, our practices, our solutions, and the information that we base every decision on. I think Strathern’s actual argument is better than the saying that she actually gets credited for. Audit, she wrote, has a life of its own that jeopardizes the life it audits. Measurement systems acquire their own dynamics and they reshape the institutions that they were built to describe. That’s what I mean by the ratchet. And it was stated in 1997.

Kevin Novak: By an anthropologist about audits in universities. So that’s my argument. And let me give you the evidence, because you deserve more than just my say-so. In 2006, Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood published a study in Public Administration called What’s Measured is What Matters, close to one of my favorite sayings, examining the target regime in the English public health care system. Not a thought experiment, a real test, at national scale, with real targets attached to real consequences. And they documented gaming across the system. Well, it rested on two false assumptions that a part could stand in for the whole. And the measurement and gaming problems didn’t much matter.

Kevin Novak: They turned out, in essence, to be the main event. And there’s a mechanism underneath all of this with a name and experimental support. In 2012 and again in 2013, Willie Choi, Gary Hecht, and William Tayler published a pair of studies on what they called surrogation. Managers come to treat the measure as the strategy itself, and they lose sight of what it was built to represent. It gets worse when compensation is attached, which you’d kind of expect. What you might not expect is that in their experiments, the substitution was still there with no performance pay involved at all. Just weaker. The money, of course, is an accelerant, but it’s not always the cause.

Kevin Novak: So this isn’t a story about bad people or lazy analytics. It’s a substitution. It happens in how competent people think inside well-run organizations, and it has been documented time and time and time again. So if the research said this in 1956 and it’s been tested at scale since 2006, the real question is no longer whether it’s true. It’s why we keep reaching for numbers anyway. That question is the foundation of issue 280 of the newsletter. So if you read the issue, you’re going to recognize what comes next. It starts with a year, 1995, and two things published in it that I’ve come to think of as a pair.

Kevin Novak: One, you have almost certainly read. The other, almost no one actually has. In 1995, John Kotter published Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. And that was in Harvard Business Review. I want to be clear where I stand on that paper because I hold it in high regard. Kotter gave this entire field its vocabulary: The Guiding Coalition, Short-Term Wins, Declaring Victory Too Soon. That article laid out eight errors, and the book that followed a year later turned them into eight steps. Much of how any of us frame organizational change and transformation traces back to that work, mine included. Well, that same year, and almost nobody remembers this, the historian Theodore Porter published Trust in Numbers.

Kevin Novak: He set out to answer a question that sounds too obvious to be worth asking: Why are modern institutions so committed to quantification? The conventional answer is that numbers spread because they work. The precision that transformed physics and chemistry turned out to be equally useful for budgets, populations, and assessing risk. And while we love to count things, we love numbers. We believe they give us clarity, and we believe they tell us whether we are accomplishing our goals. Porter argues that the account is close to exactly backwards. And he built the case through the history of actuaries, engineers, and the rise of the accounting profession. His conclusion, in his own words, is that quantification is a technology of distance.

Kevin Novak: Reliance on numbers minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust, which is what suits it to communication that has to travel beyond a community that knows one another. And here’s the part that should give all of us some pause. And I’m putting this in my own words rather than his. Numbers do their heaviest work where leadership is weak, where a private conversation would look suspect, and where trust, well, it may be very thin. So organizations don’t build elaborate measurement because their judgment is strong. They build it because their judgment is exposed. They need to build it as a substitute. So, two different frames of thought published the same year, 31 years ago.

Kevin Novak: I quote the first one nearly constantly. The second, well, most of us have never read. And the pairing is the whole point. Kotter told us what to do. Porter told us why we reach for numbers in the first place. The field took the sequence and almost skipped the underlying question. And the human factor is what fell into that gap. That’s not a failure of Kotter’s. It is what happens when a framework gets adopted faster than it gets understood. Porter picked up on a distinction I use with clients constantly, and it is simpler than it may sound. If you read last week’s issue, you have already met it, and it’s worth hearing out loud.

Kevin Novak: Some groups get to make a call and explain it afterward, because the people who know agree that they know. Other groups, well, they have to show their work up front in a form that anyone can check, because nobody will take their word for it. Picture a veteran surgeon asked why she chose a procedure, then picture a new hire asked to produce the protocol that she just followed. It’s the same question, but two very different relationships to trust. Two other historians of science, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, named that second thing back in 1992. They called it mechanical objectivity. And Porter takes the idea, and then, well, he ran with it.

Kevin Novak: Groups with standing rely on the first. Groups under suspicion build the second routinely. So hold on to that phrase, mechanical objectivity. Rules and procedures, standing in for a judgment, someone would have to defend. I’m going to come back to that when we get to the practice. And once more at the close, because I think it explains why the hardest step in all of this is so incredibly hard. So it brings me back to why I’m doing an episode about it now in 2026. What’s new isn’t a dysfunction. Ridgway had that in 1956. But three things are new. The first is volume. It has grown many times over, not a little.

Kevin Novak: The second is the audience. What you measure is no longer read only by people. It’s read by systems that summarize it and act on it, and those systems can’t tell a measure that still matters from one that stopped mattering years ago. And the third is the framing. For 70 years, we’ve treated this as a measurement problem, which means we’ve handed it to the people who are good at measurement and asked them to fix it. They’ve responded reasonably by building more measurement. More reports, more dashboards, more slides. But it isn’t a measurement problem. And you know, I can’t stress that enough. It’s a human factor problem dressed up as a measurement problem.

Kevin Novak: Every mechanism I just described runs on identity, on status, on who has the standing to say a thing out loud, and on what a person risks by saying it.

SEGMENT 2: WHY ADDING IS EASY AND REMOVING IS NOT

Kevin Novak: That’s the lens the show exists to apply. And as far as I can tell, it’s one of the things that has been missing in measurement practice. So let’s put that lens on the ratchet itself. Because the first place that it shows up isn’t where most people go looking. In most organizations, adding a measure is easy, and removing one is nearly impossible. That imbalance is not an accident. And it’s not about analytics. It is about accountability. Think about what happens when you add a metric. You’re being diligent. You’re being data-informed. Nobody objects because objecting to more information makes you look like you have something to hide.

Kevin Novak: And well, responsibility for what that number does afterwards is distributed. Across everyone who sat in the room nodding. Now think about removing one. You’re asking a room to trust that you know it no longer matters. If anything goes wrong in that area over the next 18 months, everyone’s going to remember who made that call. Again, this is not a measurement issue. It’s very much a human-factor one. Adding distributes responsibility and accountability. Removing concentrates it. Nobody has ever been fired for adding the metric. And here’s the part that surprised me when I first started noticing it. Organizations that successfully stop an initiative very often keep the measures that the initiative installed.

Kevin Novak: The program ends, the reporting survives it. That metric is still pulled every month, still sitting on the operational review, still shaping somebody’s quarterly conversations, tracking adoption of a platform or initiative that nobody uses or thinks about anymore. In the meeting room, only the brave will call attention to it. Others wonder whether the program is still running, and they might have missed the email. And others realize their own performance plan still contains that measure. So the measure remains. So measures continue to survive. And here’s the part leaders always underestimate. They don’t just survive; they wire themselves in, and removing them gets harder and harder every quarter and every year.

Kevin Novak: Every measure that survives its first year gets connected to something. A monthly report, an input to compensation formulas, embedded in performance goals, a cell on a board slide that your directors now expect and use to judge performance. Sooner or later, it turns up in a grant commitment, or a client agreement, or a filing, and at that moment it stops being a measure and it becomes an obligation. Which means that by the time anyone notices a measure has outlived its purpose, removing it is no longer an analytical act. It’s a political negotiation with people who aren’t in the room. So it stays. And it keeps influencing behavior from the background, where nobody is actively defending it, and nobody can be blamed for it.

Kevin Novak: The measures with the most power over how your organization behaves are frequently the ones that nobody remembers even asking for.

SEGMENT 3: THE FREE-FOR-ALL

Kevin Novak: So that is how measures survive. Now I want to get into how they multiply, which is the thing I see more than anything else in client work, and the piece that gets discussed the least. Start with where the modern dashboard comes from. In January 1992, Robert Kaplan and David Norton published The Balanced Scorecard in Harvard Business Review. They argued that financial measures alone were inadequate, and managers needed a view across four perspectives at once. Their anchor is a sentence that you have heard many times since, no doubt. What you measure is what you get. I’m going to be fair to that paper. It was a genuine advance over running an organization on quarterly earnings.

Kevin Novak: And it is the direct ancestor of every executive dashboard in use today. I was trained on it. I was educated on it. I built those dashboards with clients early on. It’s what we knew how to do. But look at the sequence. Ridgway examined multiple measures in 1956 and found that they produce unresolved trade-offs and contradictory pressure on the people in the middle. Thirty-six years later, the field’s most influential prescription was Use Multiple Measures. The remedy that we adopted at scale was the one the research had already flagged, and we missed it completely. Ridgway’s cure, worse than the disease, prescribed to everybody. People poked holes in Ridgway at the time.

Kevin Novak: And in the details, there are always fair questions. But at the scale we work at now, he has turned out to be more right than wrong. So why did we go the other way? The technology arrived, and well, it changed the shape of the problem. Access got distributed. Self-service analytics, data warehouses, tools that don’t need a developer. On its face, that was good. The alternative was a bottleneck where every question went through a central team and came back three weeks later. We didn’t like that. We like structure right up until we want something now. We think of ourselves as a patient species, and then our attention spans go looking for the answer in the moment.

Kevin Novak: But here’s what actually happens when you give everyone access to all the data. There’s a creativity that takes hold. A person tracks what they want to track. A team builds exactly the view of its own performance that makes sense from inside that team. And they do it because they’re conscientious people trying to understand their own work. Sit with that because the instinct is to ask who’s at fault. Nobody’s behaving badly here. Every one of these dashboards was built by somebody trying to do their job well. And teams do have real needs. A project has milestones, the enterprise scorecard is never going to carry. Some measures shouldn’t roll up to the scorecard, some can only be applied subjectively.

Kevin Novak: Which is a real category, and it should not be treated as a failure. Where it goes wrong is what happens next. The access and the creativity become data points. The data points become progress measures. The progress measures get spoken about. They get put into decks and status reports. Some align with how the organization formally measures itself, but many don’t. Either way, you end up with a view of performance that runs counter to the organization’s own story. Not maliciously, structurally. Then different ideas of what good looks like take shape in pockets and they don’t match. And the free-for-all feeds itself. Because when your view disagrees with somebody else’s, the natural move is to build a measure that proves you right.

Kevin Novak: Then comes a step that nobody notices. What gets measured along with its intent and its interpretation becomes part of the organization’s story, part of its culture. It becomes the thing people say about what we’re doing. And it carries the bias of whoever decided that that measure mattered in the first place. There’s research that explains this better than I can, and it’s older than most of the technology. In 1981, Martha Feldman and James March published a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly. It was called Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol. Their central observation is that organizations systematically gather more information than they use. And they keep requesting more.

Kevin Novak: Information is collected and never consulted, or it’s collected after a decision has effectively already been made, or collected in surveillance mode with no decision in view at all. Their explanation is the part that really matters here. The use of information is governed by social norms. Being seen to gather data. And to consult it signals competence and legitimacy. Information functions as a symbol and a signal, independent of whether it informs anything. Think about that in terms of a modern dashboard. And I think it lands kind of hard. A great deal of what your organization measures is not there to inform a decision, it’s there to demonstrate seriousness.

Kevin Novak: And a measure that exists to demonstrate seriousness has no natural end because the need it serves is never ever going to be satisfied. Karl Weick, one of my favorite researchers, gives us the second half here. In Sensemaking in Organizations from 1995, he argues that people act first and interpret afterwards, imposing meaning backward onto events. And that the story that they produce shapes what the organization does next. So sense making runs on plausibility, not accuracy. That’s exactly what happens as we keep adding measures. Not truth about the organization, but a plausible account of it, assembled from whichever measures happen to get built by whoever happened to build them.

Kevin Novak: Chris Argyris and Donald Schön named the gap this creates back in 1974. There’s what people say governs their behavior, and there’s what you’d infer from watching what they actually do, one of my favorite topics. The two routinely come apart, and people rarely notice. Your official scorecard is the first one. The measures your teams actually watch are the second. When those drift apart, you don’t have a reporting problem. You have an organization telling itself a story its own behavior does not support. One more. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein document how much professional judgment varies on identical cases, and it’s far more than anyone in the room assumes.

Kevin Novak: Measuring more doesn’t reduce that variation. It gives it numbers to hide behind. So before I leave this segment, a word about the numbers themselves. Because I went looking. I wanted a hard figure on how many metrics a typical organization tracks. Almost every number that I chased led back to some marketing material from companies that sell tools to fix the problem the number describes. No primary source, no disclosed methodology that gave me what I was looking for. There was one real exception. The United States Census Bureau runs something called the Management and Organizational Practices Survey. And it asked manufacturers directly how many key performance indicators that they monitor.

Kevin Novak: More than 35,000 establishments answered it in 2015, and more than 36,000 in 2021. Over 80% track three or more. Roughly a third track 10 or more. But 10 or more is the highest answer the survey offers. So it can tell you that organizations measure a great deal, and it can’t tell you an average. Nobody credibly can. My guess is that while I have been talking, you have been counting your own. Not just the measures, but the dashboards, the reports, the standing views, the exports that nobody asked about this year.

SEGMENT 4: WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE IN THE ROOM

Kevin Novak: So say you decide to do something about that list. Here’s what I’ve experienced sitting with a leadership team when they try to contend with it. Somebody always will defend a measure emotionally. And the defense won’t be about the measure. It’ll be about the work that it represents, the year that they spent building it, the argument they won to get it approved. Identity threat shows up in a metrics review exactly the way it shows up everywhere else in change and transformation. And if you treat that as irrationality, you’re gonna lose the room. Treat it as a signal instead. Resistance showing up in one of these conversations is telling you where a measure still matters to people, even when it has stopped telling the organization anything useful.

Kevin Novak: Those are the ones to leave alone for a cycle and come back to later. You’re not giving in. You are choosing the order. The wrong question to put forward is: does anybody still need this? It sounds open, but it really isn’t. What people hear is, is anybody willing to admit they don’t need this? And the honest answer is gonna cost them something. So the room says nothing, and the measure survives by default. The better question is: what decision did we make differently last quarter because of this number? That’s answerable; it’s specific. It’s not about anybody’s worth, and it doesn’t require anyone to put their career on the line.

Kevin Novak: And when nobody can answer it, that fact alone belongs to the group rather than to a person, which is the whole point. Notice what I did there. All I changed was the wording. But those words take ownership and defensiveness out of the question. Which in the end is what lets the room look at it straight. The other move is to separate the measure from the person before you separate it from the dashboard. Say out loud that the work was good. The instrument served its purpose. And the purpose, well, it’s passed. People will accept the retirement of a measure. What they won’t accept and shouldn’t is the implication that building it was a waste of their effort and time.

Kevin Novak: So, three things you can expect when you run the exercise. First, somebody discovers an attachment that nobody knew about. This happens far too frequently. A downstream report, a formula, a contract that references a number by name. People get embarrassed as though the exercise caught them out. Well it didn’t. That’s the exercise working. You were always gonna find it. The only question was whether you found it in a room where you were looking or on the day that it broke. Second, the room gets quiet the way I described at the top, and somebody says some version of it. We don’t actually know why we track that.

Kevin Novak: You don’t want to move past it. Let it sit. That sentence is the most useful thing anyone will say all day. And the instinct in most organizations is to smooth it over in about four seconds. Third, somebody will propose replacing the measure you’re retiring with a better one in the same meeting. Resist that gently. A session that ends with a net addition hasn’t retired anything. It’s only tightened the ratchet all over again.

SEGMENT 5: THE PRACTICE

Kevin Novak: So let me give you the way to do this. I’ve written about it before in my measuring what matters work. It’s about four questions I put into every measure. They are simpler than they look, and I have never found a measure that survives all four when people answer them honestly. One, what is the purpose of this measure? Two, what decision or action does this measure inform? Three, how does this measure connect to other measures? Four, is this measure still relevant? So question one sounds obvious, and it almost never is. Purpose is not the same as subject. A measure can be about customer retention and have no purpose beyond appearing on a slide.

Kevin Novak: Question two is the one with some teeth, and it is Feldman and March who put it into practical use. If the honest answer is that it informs nothing, then it gets gathered and never looked at, and you found what’s called sediment. So say out loud in the room, this isn’t working for us. It is sediment. Question three is where you catch surrogation, the mechanism that Choi, Hecht, and Tayler documented. When a measure connects to nothing else, it stops being a proxy and it starts being the thing itself. Isolated measures are the ones mistaken often for strategy. And question four is the hardest by a wide margin, because it’s the only one whose honest answer requires a person to stand behind a removal.

Kevin Novak: In stable conditions, it’s annual housekeeping. In conditions like the ones we are in now, I think it’s the whole discipline. Around those questions, here’s how I’d run the practice. Six moves. And I’ll tell you what each one is actually for. First, inventory what is actually produced, not what’s on the dashboard. The dashboard is the visible layer. Underneath it are the standing reports, the scheduled exports, the recurring board attachments, and the spreadsheet that somebody maintains by hand every Thursday because a director asked for it in 2019. So expect the real list to be two to three times the size of what everyone believed existed. That surprise is itself the finding.

Kevin Novak: Most organizations can’t say how much they actually measure. Second, put every item through the four questions, not the ones you suspect, every item. The reason is the surrogation research again. You can’t predict which measures have quietly become the strategy because the substitution happens without anybody noticing. You find them by asking, not by guessing. Third, trace the attachments before you touch anything. Who uses it? What formula depends on it? What outside commitment references it? What breaks if it disappears? This is what separates a retirement practice from a spring cleaning, and skipping it is how good intentions blow up a compensation cycle. It also protects you politically because the objection you can’t answer is the one that you didn’t see coming.

Kevin Novak: This is also where the room often changes. The people who can tell you what a measure costs are not the people who own it. The owner knows what it was for. The analyst who pulls it every month knows what it takes and what breaks when the source system changes. The manager three levels down knows whose behavior it’s actually shaping. Nobody ever asked those last two. You gotta bring them in for this step. When we do this with clients, we’ve already done that homework. So we walk in knowing roughly what we’re gonna hear. Fourth, name the person who owns the removal by name. In the minutes, not the committee, not the function.

Kevin Novak: A person on the record saying this has served its purpose, and here’s why it ends. That is the step that everything else rests on. And it’s the one your organization will try the hardest to skip, because it’s the only one that costs anybody anything. And notice what it does. It turns a measurement decision back into a human judgment that somebody is accountable for, which of course is exactly what mechanical objectivity was built to avoid. You are asking a person to stand behind a judgment call that others can argue with, inside a system that’s designed so that nobody would have to. That’s the whole reason it’s hard, and the whole reason that it actually works.

Kevin Novak: Fifth, put it on a cadence and let the cadence carry the weight. An annual retirement review that is expected, scheduled, and ordinary is a completely different social event from a one-time purge that somebody has to champion. We far too often tackle a thing once, feel good about the result, and we never take it on again. An organization and its measurements are a living and breathing structure. It needs care and feeding, the same as anything else that you want to keep alive. The established and routine cadence is what makes the fourth step survivable. Because the person doing it is executing a standard practice rather than attacking a colleague’s dashboard.

Kevin Novak: Sixth and last, measure the first cycle by what’s stopped. Nothing else. Not what you improved, not what you replaced, what stopped. One caution here I want you to consider. And it starts with the best advice on this I’ve heard from anybody. Back to Tom Serena, he gave it to a new leader in his episode. Don’t come in to transform. Come in to find out what needs to be transformed. I believe that. And I want to flag how it gets misused. Coming in to find out has no natural endpoint. Discovery is comfortable in exactly the way a pilot program is comfortable. It threatens nobody. It gives everyone something to report.

Kevin Novak: And anyone who’d rather not decide can extend it indefinitely. So put a time limit on it and make sure it ends in a decision with a named person who owns it. Otherwise, it’s not patience. It’s the same theater performed again and again, at a slower pace, which of course is harder to spot, and therefore so much worse than the alternative.

SEGMENT 6: WHERE THE SEASON GOES

Kevin Novak: So that is the practice, and it’s what this season is built to support. So, where are we heading? A season of this show runs about 18 episodes. So, what I’m about to describe is the first stretch rather than the whole thing. I want room to adapt to what you tell me you need. Seven conversations are scheduled over the next few weeks. And they’re all different angles on the same question. Tina Berger, a digital transformation advisor, with two decades of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, takes up what happens when an initiative finishes on scope and on schedule and still misses the point of why it actually ever started.

Kevin Novak: The measures survive, the intent doesn’t, and everyone is reporting green. David Edward, creator of the performance ecosystem model, is going to argue the performance is lost before execution ever begins. And the leaders should measure capacity rather than tonnage and hours. It’s a direct challenge to the way most organizations build the scorecards I kept mentioning today. Michelle Pipes, author of Stewarding Joyful Change, asks what change actually feels like to the people living inside it, and whether that can be measured at all. I don’t know the answer to that, which is usually a sign it’s going to be worth a great hour. Grant Van Ulbrich built the SCARED SO WHAT model after he noticed what the field had missed.

Kevin Novak: We have spent decades building models for the organization. Nobody has built the thing a person actually uses on the Tuesday that change is happening to them. Adrian Wolfberg, who spent nearly 40 years as an intelligence officer and wrote Who Leads When AI Thinks, takes on judgment and ambiguity in the age of machine intelligence. Gail Perry has spent four decades in nonprofit fundraising and governance. And she takes on the board problem. You cannot govern your way out of a behavioral problem. And most board dysfunction gets diagnosed as a structural question when it’s actually a really human one. And Rachel Franco. Founder of Fail Smarter takes up what has to be true before any measure in this episode matters.

Kevin Novak: Whether anyone will say out loud that something isn’t working while there’s still time to act. There’s so much more coming this season. But these are all different entry points, with one question underneath all of them: What are we counting? Who decided? And does anyone still have the standing to stop?

CLOSE

Kevin Novak: So here’s where I want to leave you today. Nearly every organization measures too much. That’s not the interesting part. And Ridgway told us that in 1956. So I would just be repeating him and myself. The interesting part, however, is whether anyone inside your organization has the standing to say that a number’s time has come. And whether the day after they said it, they’d still have that standing. That’s a question about accountability and trust and identity. It’s the judgment that mechanical objectivity was built so nobody would have to make it. Which is to say, it was never a measurement question at all. It’s the human factor showing up in the one place we were most certain we had designed it out.

Kevin Novak: My Ideas and Innovations newsletter, issue 280, went out last Thursday, and there’s a good deal more detail in it than we had time for here. The history runs deeper there, and so does the practice. And I’m asking listeners the same thing I asked readers last week. And I mean this as a real request rather than a rhetorical flourish. Tell me about a measure your organization actually retired. Who owned the removal? What broke? And what it cost the person who put their name on it? I’m going to collect these across the season and I’ll bring back what I learned. If you found this episode of value, share it with your leadership team or with whoever in your organization owns the dashboard.

Kevin Novak: That’s the conversation this episode is trying to start with them. Next week, the Human Factor Podcast Season 3 begins its conversations on practice. Until next time, remember, this is ultimately about measuring what matters. Because what we measure rightly or wrongly becomes a norm. And the norm stops being questioned long before anyone remembers that somebody chose it. And please remember this as well. It is never the technology, the market conditions, or the strategy that makes change and transformation successful. It’s the people. This is the Human Factor Podcast. I’m Kevin Novak. Thank you for watching or listening.

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