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Are Your KPIs Gaslighting You?

We don’t talk enough about how much dysfunction in the system can get rewarded in business.
… Or the person who uncovers, updates the system and everyone is better for it.

Both of those statements can be true at the same time (which is weird).

We design systems to measure performance…
To drive outcomes… to create accountability.
And for a while, they seem to work.
The problem has a fix.
The numbers go up.
The charts are green.
The dashboards hum.
The analytics paints a picture.

But then the weird stuff starts to happen.

Workarounds.
Shadow processes.
Invisible friction that no one wants to talk about, because they assume it’s a feature and not a bug.
And yet… the metrics still look great (on a certain level).
Because we train everyone else on this process.
Because we’ve built systems that reward optics over insight.
Because the phrase “that’s how it’s always been done” gets tossed around.

This was the thread that pulled me in during this week’s conversation with Nelson Repenning on Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast.

We dug into how easy it is for businesses to end up performing success while burying the very problems those systems were meant to solve.
Think about how many times you’ve seen a company hit a milestone… while its teams were drowning in chaos and process.
How often have we praised the outcome… while ignoring the burnout, the workarounds, the emotional cost of holding it all together behind the scenes?
We live in a culture obsessed with inputs and outputs… with speed and scale… with “hitting the numbers”… with KPIs and OKRs.

But what is the real cost… the real truth?

It’s all the unspoken stuff happening in between.
The firefighting that gets normalized.
The meetings that serve as proxies for progress.
The good people who quietly leave because no one was willing to name the system failures out loud (let alone have the time to fix it).

This is not about incompetence.

It’s about the limits of surface-level problem-solving.
It’s about what happens when we reward performing stability instead of building systems that can generate learning.
I’ve been thinking about how many teams never get the time or trust to fix the thing beneath the thing.
That feeling of knowing how to create better outcomes because you’re in the business… not just working on it.

If you’ve ever worked inside a system that looked good on paper… but felt broken in places in practice… this one’s for you.

(Nelson is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and we talked about his new book – which will be out at the end of August – There’s Got to Be a Better Way – How To Deliver Results And Get Rid Of The Stuff That Gets In The Way Of Real Work on this week’s episode).

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.