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Essay 4 · Beyond the scoreboard

The answer to a bad scoreboard.

Why what we measure shapes what we can imagine, and why a better scoreboard is never the fix.

Richard Bourne·November 2026·6 minute read

The customer service dashboard is green. Ninety-six per cent of complaints closed within two days. The target is ninety. The team is praised at the monthly review.

On the phones, the same customers are ringing back. Closing a complaint and solving it turned out to be two different things, and only one of them was being counted. Nobody lied. Nobody cheated. The team did exactly what the organisation asked of it, very well.

That is the uncomfortable part. Measures don’t fail because people game them. They fail because people take them seriously.

What a measure does to the work

Every measure starts as a window. Someone wants to see whether the work is going well, and picks something countable that seems to move with it. Complaints closed. Calls answered. Leaks fixed. Projects on time.

Then the window becomes a target. It goes in the performance pack, then in objectives, then in pay. And slowly the work bends towards the number. People are rational: if the organisation rewards what is counted, that is where the effort goes. The thing the measure was meant to show drifts further away, so the measure gets refined, and the cycle starts again.

What we measure shapes what we are able to imagine. After a while, people stop asking whether the customer’s problem was solved, because that question isn’t on the screen. The scoreboard becomes the game.

A law about this

In 1975 the economist Charles Goodhart observed that a statistic used to steer policy tends to stop behaving the way it did before it was used that way. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later put it more simply, in the form most people now quote: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The British public sector has learned this repeatedly. The public inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, published in 2013, described an organisation that had focused on targets and finances at the expense of the care it existed to provide. It was not short of data. It was short of attention to what the data couldn’t show.

That is the real risk. Not that the numbers are wrong, but that they are right about the wrong thing, and so convincing that nobody looks past them.

How to tell it’s happening

These are the signs I look for:

  • The numbers are good, and the people doing the work look tired or uneasy.
  • Teams talk about hitting the metric more than about what the metric is for.
  • New measures get added. Old ones never go.
  • Reports take days to prepare, and nobody can name the decision they inform.
  • When a number goes red, the first conversation is about the number, not the work.
  • Someone says "that’s not how it’s measured" to end a discussion.

What to do about it

The instinct is to build a better scoreboard: more balanced, more sophisticated, with a measure to catch the gaming of the last measure. That is the old trap repeating. The answer to a bad scoreboard is never a better scoreboard.

Hold a metric amnesty. List every regular report, dashboard and KPI. For each, name who reads it and which decision it drives. Anything that drives no decision goes on a retirement list, with no blame for having built it. Most organisations are surprised by how much is on that list.

Put a voice next to every number. For each measure that matters, regularly ask the people closest to the work what it doesn’t show. A short conversation alongside the dashboard will catch what the dashboard can’t.

Measure less, look more. Fewer measures, read more carefully, beat many measures skimmed. Keep the ones that genuinely help people see, and let the rest go.

Keep measures as windows, not targets. Where you can, use numbers to start conversations rather than to settle them. Be cautious about tying any single measure to reward. And that includes any score this work produces.

Questions for your team
  • Which scoreboard could we simply stop keeping?
  • What does our best-performing measure not show?
  • If we could only keep five numbers, which would they be, and why?

Where this connects

Beyond the scoreboard sits in the Redesign phase of the Oppositism map, because changing what you count is one of the most powerful redesigns available. It is often where Decisions nobody made become most visible, as measures accumulate the same way processes do. It connects to What goes unsaid, because a confident dashboard is a good place for bad news to hide, and to Ground truth: the work as it is, rather than the work as it is reported.

If you only take one question away, let it be this: what are our numbers right about that doesn’t matter?

Take it further

Find out which numbers are steering you.

The metric amnesty is one of the exercises in a full engagement. Start with the Drift Check, a ten-minute look at where your organisation has drifted, or follow the idea across the map.

RedesignBeyond the scoreboardThe answer to a bad scoreboard is never a better scoreboard.ChallengeDecisions nobody madeNo one chose the result. Everyone chose the next step.GroundWhat goes unsaidThe most important communication in an organisation often happens in what nobody says.
Take the Drift CheckHow it works
About the author Richard Bourne

Twenty years in transformation and recovery, mostly where things were hardest. MBA, teacher by training, and now defining the philosophy of why this keeps happening. If you’re inside something that has forgotten what it’s for, I want to hear from you.

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