From Noise to Clarity | Track 15
When the Numbers Decide #12
Thinking Traps | Post 12 of 35. (How we judge)
Before you read: think of a number your work is judged by. When did it last tell you something it couldn’t possibly know?
The sales board at a car dealership hung on the wall behind reception, where every customer could see it. Each salesperson had a row, and each row showed the number that mattered that quarter: test drives booked. Head office had decided that test drives were a strong early sign of a sale, so the dealership manager had made them the measure everyone was judged on.
It worked beautifully. Within a month, test drives had nearly doubled.
It took the manager a little longer to notice that sales hadn’t moved. When he finally sat in on a few bookings, he found out why. Salespeople were booking test drives with anyone who showed a flicker of interest, with customers who had already decided against buying, and in one memorable case, with a salesperson’s own brother, twice.
Nobody had cheated, exactly. They had done what the number asked of them. The number had simply stopped meaning what it was supposed to mean.
That’s the trap of letting the numbers decide. When we judge work by what’s easy to measure, the measurable thing starts to crowd out the meaningful thing it was meant to stand for.
Every number is a stand in for something you care about but can’t count directly. The moment you start managing the stand in, it can drift away from the thing itself. The way out is to draw what the chart can’t see right beside the chart, so both are in front of you when you decide.
Why numbers end up deciding
Numbers are attractive for good reasons. They’re clear, comparable and easy to share. A rising line on a chart feels objective in a way that a conversation never does. In a busy organisation, a number gives everyone something firm to stand on.
The difficulty is that the things we care about deeply are often hard to measure. Trust. Learning. Care. Judgement. The quality of a relationship with a customer. So we pick something nearby that we can count, and over time the countable thing quietly takes the place of the thing we wanted.
Researchers call this metric fixation: the belief that what can be measured is what matters, and the habit of managing the measure instead of the work. It tends to grow stronger as a number becomes more important. Once a figure is tied to targets, bonuses or rankings, people naturally find ways to move the figure, and not all of those ways move the work.
“Every number is a stand in for something you care about but can’t count directly.”
The same thing happens in our own careers. We count what’s easy to count: certificates gained, followers added, hours logged, applications sent. Each one is a reasonable sign of progress. But the things that actually build a career, such as the trust of a few people who would vouch for you, or the quality of the problems you’re now trusted to solve, never appear on any of those tallies.
This isn’t an argument against measuring. It’s an argument against letting the measure make the decision on its own. A number can tell you that something has changed. It rarely tells you whether the change is the one you wanted.
How do you know the numbers are deciding for you?
Try this: Take one number your team is judged on, and write down in plain words the thing it is supposed to stand for.
The first tell is a number that improves while the thing it stood for doesn’t. If the measure is going up and nobody feels the work getting better, the two have probably come apart.
The second tell is behaviour that makes sense only for the number. When you notice people doing things that help the figure but would look strange to an outsider, such as booking a test drive with a brother, the measure has started steering the work.
The third tell is a meeting that never leaves the chart. If every conversation about performance is a conversation about the number, and nobody ever asks what the number can’t show, the chart has become the decision maker.
A client of mine, the head of visitor experience at a museum, was under pressure to increase visitor numbers. Her team responded with energy. They ran free evening events, added family days and promoted the café. Visitor numbers rose steadily, and her board was delighted.
When she came to see me, she was uneasy, and she couldn’t say why. The number was good. I asked her to draw her visitor chart on the left of a page, and then, on the right, to draw what the chart couldn’t see.
She drew a small stick figure standing in front of a painting, then crossed it out and drew it again walking past. She drew a crowded entrance hall and a quiet gallery upstairs. She drew a school group that had stopped coming because the evening events had taken over the education room. The right half of her page told her what the left half couldn’t: more people were coming through the door, and fewer of them were really visiting.
She kept the events but protected the galleries and the education room, and she started reporting one simple observation alongside the visitor count: how many people stayed long enough to look at something properly. Her board found it just as persuasive.
“More people were coming through the door, and fewer of them were really visiting.”
The sketch that springs the trap: the unseen half
I call the escape sketch the unseen half. It puts the chart and what the chart can’t see on the same page.
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Take a page and draw a line down the middle. On the left, draw the chart you’ve been looking at. Keep it rough: a few bars or a line going up or down. This is the measurable half.
On the right, draw the thing the number is supposed to stand for, and everything around it that the number can’t capture. Use simple pictures. Stick figures for the people involved, and what they’re doing. A cloud for how they feel. A small box for a part of the work that never shows up in the report. Add a few words under each picture if you need them.
For the car dealership, the left half would have shown test drives climbing. The right half might have shown a customer who had already bought elsewhere being coaxed into the driving seat, a salesperson’s weekend spent on drives that went nowhere, and a genuine buyer waiting at reception because everyone was out on the road.
Then look across the line and ask one question. If the left half keeps improving, what is happening on the right?
Sometimes the answer is reassuring. The right half is healthy, and the number is doing its job as a fair stand in. Often, though, the right half shows something the left half is hiding, a cost, a shortcut or a group of people being squeezed so the figure can rise.
When that happens, choose one thing from the right half to protect. You don’t need to replace the number or measure everything. Just name the one thing the number must not be allowed to damage, and check on it whenever you check the figure.
As a visual strategist, I find the unseen half changes the tone of performance conversations. Charts tend to make people defensive, because a chart feels like a verdict. The right half of the page invites a different kind of talk, about what people actually see and care about, and it gives the people who do the work a place to say what the numbers have missed.
What happens when a team draws the unseen half
I once anonymously observed a case at an organisation where a nursing director at an aged care provider was reviewing a new efficiency measure. Home care visits were being timed, and the target was to reduce the average visit length so carers could fit more visits into each day. The figure had improved steadily, and the operations team was pleased.
The director asked a group of senior carers to draw the unseen half with her. On the left, she drew the falling visit time. On the right, the carers drew what happened in a shorter visit. A resident’s medication given, but no time to ask how she had slept. A meal left on the table, but nobody to sit with him while he ate it. A cloud over one elderly man who now saw no other person all day except the carer, and only for a few minutes.
The director took the page to the next leadership meeting and put it beside the chart. Nobody argued with the efficiency figure. But the decision changed. Visit times were set by need rather than by target, and a simple check on loneliness was added to every care review.
“Nobody argued with the efficiency figure. But the decision changed.”
A note on the book that shapes this series
This track draws on The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, which I co authored with Sherrie Low. Sherrie and I describe the move from Story to Takeaway as the moment you decide what the evidence in front of you means.
When the numbers decide, the Story shrinks to whatever was counted, and the Takeaway follows the count. The unseen half returns the rest of the Story to the page, so the Takeaway you draw reflects the work as it really is, not only the part of it that fits on a chart.
Your trap card
The trap: letting what’s measurable crowd out what’s meaningful.
The tell: the number improves while the work doesn’t, and behaviour makes sense only for the figure.
The sketch: the unseen half. Chart on the left, what the chart can’t see on the right, and one thing to protect.
Numbers belong in every serious decision. They keep us honest about scale and change. The trap is letting them decide alone. A line down the middle of a page is enough to give the rest of the story its seat at the table.
What does the number your team is judged on fail to see, and who is quietly paying for that?
Next in Thinking Traps: Solving the Wrong Problem, the trap of answering the question nobody asked, and a sketch that draws the problem from the customer’s side first.
This idea comes from The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, co authored by Ai Yat Goh and Sherrie Low, published by Marshall Cavendish Business. If seeing beyond the chart is useful to you, the book goes further into applying visual thinking across career and business decisions. Get it on Amazon.
Ai Yat Goh is a Visual Thinking Strategist, educator and entrepreneur based in Singapore, and Asia’s first Master Trainer for Dan Roam’s Power of Visual Series. She works with professionals, teams and organisations navigating a pivot, helping people see clearly before they act. Connect on LinkedIn or read more on Medium.
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BK HAN Candy Chan RH Malini Lawrence Lee Jessica Leong PUN Kai Loon Joelynn Koh Angela Toh
