Drowning in Data but Starving for Insight
This piece is written by my colleague Ayça Tümer Arıkan, a fellow member of the global PuMP team.
You have more data than any leader in history. So why does “how are we actually doing?” still get answered with a guess?
Picture the last time someone asked you how the business was really performing. Not the dashboard version, the honest version. If you’re like most leaders I work with, you had numbers for everything and confidence in almost none of them. You could show a hundred metrics. You just couldn’t say, without hesitating, whether the things that matter were getting better.
That gap between how much you measure and how little you know is one of the most expensive problems in business. And almost nobody names it, because on the surface everything looks under control. The reports are full. The dashboards are green. The meetings done as planned.
What the drowning actually costs you
Start with the bill you can see. Add up the hours your teams spend each month producing reports, updating dashboards, and preparing for review meetings. Now ask how many of those hours change a single decision. For most organisations, the honest answer is: very few. That’s not reporting, that’s expensive theatre, and you’re paying full price for it every month.
Then there’s the bill you can’t see, which is far larger. Every decision made on a number that measures activity instead of results is a decision made half-blind. You reward the team that looks busy over the team that moves the needle. You pour budget into initiatives that create no real value. You find out something wasn’t working a quarter too late, because the measure that would have warned you was never watching the right thing.
More data didn’t protect you from any of this. It made it worse, by burying the few signals that matter under a hundred that don’t.
Why this quietly corrodes your culture
Here’s the part that outlasts any single bad quarter. When people work with a pile of measures that never really change a decision, they learn that measurement here is a ritual, not a tool. Nobody acts on the numbers, so the numbers stop meaning anything. And that belief doesn’t stay contained. The day a genuinely important measure finally lands on the table, it’s treated the same. You lose not just the wasted measures, but the ability to be believed when something actually matters.
The precondition nobody wants to talk about
But there’s a deeper reason the data stays untrustworthy, and it has nothing to do with software. In most organisations, measures are used to judge people: tied to the review, the bonus, the reputation or punishment. And the moment a number shows an unwanted truth, you stop reporting what’s true and start reporting what’s safe. The data curls in on itself to protect the people.
No dashboard survives that. You cannot get honest measurement inside a culture of fear, because fear and truth can’t occupy the same number. This is why the fix is never purely technical. Measures only tell the truth when they’re used to learn: “what is this telling us about the work?”, rather than to judge: “whose fault is this?” Change that one thing, and people stop hiding the numbers and start bringing them to you. Leave it unchanged, and the best-designed measure in the world will still lie to you politely.
What changes when you measure less, and better
The leaders who escape this don’t have bigger dashboards. They have fewer, sharper measures where each one is a genuine piece of evidence that a real result is happening or isn’t and used in an environment safe enough that the numbers can be honest. And the difference in how they run is incredible: decisions get made faster and with more confidence, because the measure actually answers the question asked. Review meetings stop being defensive theatre and start being useful. Teams stop gaming numbers nobody believes and start improving results everybody can see. The wasted hours come back.
That’s the real return; not better KPIs, but clarity, speed, right decisions made on time and money that stops leaking. The measures are just how you get there.
Getting there takes the harder step most organisations skip: deciding what actually matters before deciding what to count, then designing measures that are real evidence of it and using them to learn, not to judge. That discipline turning a vague goal into the specific, observable proof that it’s being achieved is exactly what most measurement approaches, from OKRs to Balanced Scorecard, assume you’ve already done. Usually, you haven’t.
This is where PuMP delivers its real return: it replaces guess-driven strategy with undeniable proof, turning your measurement system from a defensive shield into your fastest decision-making engine.
You don’t need more data. You need a handful of measures you can trust and a culture safe enough to trust them out loud.
Culture is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is how you use measurement.
Questions for Creating Your Excellence Advantage
✳️ Are your reports full and dashboards green, and yet you are not sure if you are “succeeding”?
✳️ Do you measure what matters, or simply what everyone else in your industry monitors?
✳️ Do you generate truth or fear in your (monthly) performance measure reviews?
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Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.