Explore / Counterposition
“Dashboards create visibility”
A dashboard shows what was measured. Visibility needs a question and an action.
Published September 2026
The strongest formulation
Decisions made without data rely on anecdote and the loudest voice. A dashboard puts the same numbers in front of everyone, quickly, and makes problems harder to ignore.
Why it is attractive
It is a visible deliverable that looks like oversight. It turns a messy situation into something that fits on a screen.
Where it holds
It holds when each figure answers a question someone has already agreed to act on, and the people acting can see its uncertainty.
Where it breaks
It breaks when it shows what was easy to log rather than what matters. What is off the screen becomes invisible, and once a figure is watched people work to move it rather than the thing it stood for.
What evidence matters
Goodhart’s law, and Campbell (1979) on how a quantitative indicator used for decisions becomes corrupted and corrupts the process it monitors. The base rate matters for any alert. What matters is whether decisions changed, and whether they were better, after the dashboard existed.
More precisely
A more precise version
A dashboard makes a decision visible when each figure is tied to a named question and action, and it shows only the part of the situation that was measured.
Where next
Follow this idea
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Data strategy and governance (opens in a new tab)Guide
Related argument
Evidence of learningDomain
Challenge it
WP-06: The usefulness of an educational metric decreases when the metric becomes a substitute for the construct it was meant to approximate.Working proposition