Metric Authority Drift

Metrics quietly replace judgment.

What began as indicators become decision-makers. People stop asking whether a number is meaningful and start asking whether it is green. Authority shifts from humans to dashboards without an explicit decision to do so.

Judgment under uncertainty.

Metrics scale faster than understanding. They offer safety, defensibility, and apparent objectivity in complex environments. Leadership incentives favor explainable decisions over correct ones.

• Framed as rigor
• Reinforced by reporting cadence
• Protected by governance language
• Rarely challenged directly
• Backed by "industry benchmarks"

The system cannot distinguish signal from score.

• Data-driven leadership
• Accountability
• Operational maturity
• Professionalization

In reality, it is abdicated judgment.

• Decisions justified solely by numbers
• Teams ask "what's the metric?" before "what's happening?"
• Qualitative signals dismissed as anecdotes
• Leaders defer to dashboards in edge cases
• Success defined as "hitting targets" despite worsening outcomes

When metrics end conversations instead of informing them, drift has begun.

• "We need better KPIs"
• "The data is wrong"
• "Teams aren't data-driven enough"
• "People are gaming the system"
• "We need tighter targets"

Core error: The metric is doing work it was never designed to do.

Explicit boundaries on metric authority.

Not:

• Better dashboards
• More data literacy training

But:

• Declared zones where judgment overrides metrics
• Leaders modeling metric refusal in edge cases
• Metrics treated as inputs, not verdicts
• Retrospectives focused on decision quality, not outcomes

Metrics should inform decisions, not replace them.

Metric is subordinated to judgment or redesigned.

Invalidate metric as decision authority.

Upstream: FM-03 Responsibility Without Authority, FM-05 Normalized Workarounds

Downstream: FM-10 Leadership Saturation, FM-12 Strategic Myopia