Might a Business Be Measuring the Easiest Metric Instead of the Most Important One?
What gets measured is not always what matters.
Sometimes. Easy-to-measure indicators can attract attention away from more valuable but harder-to-measure factors.
A company tracks website visits obsessively while paying little attention to customer retention.
The hidden mechanism is measurement gravity. Quantities that are easy to collect often receive disproportionate attention.
Managers naturally trust numbers they can see every day.
A metric becomes dangerous when its visibility is mistaken for importance.
