Editorial
The hunger for measurement is making organizational interventions worse, not better.
When people decide they want to eat healthier, many turn to “counting macros,” the process of tracking daily grams of proteins, carbs and fats consumed. The goal is better nutrition. But often, ironically, they find themselves choosing packaged foods over whole ones. Not because processed options are healthier, but because they're easier to measure. The pursuit of precision undermines nutrition.
A similar dynamic is destroying how organizations approach change.
Finance teams prefer direct marketing to branding campaigns. The latter is much harder to measure. And yet, no less important for building customer awareness and loyalty.
The pattern repeats itself across how companies approach everything from building better team dynamics to improving decision-making. Organizations design interventions around what looks good on dashboards rather than what actually changes how work gets done.
We're Measuring Activity, Not Impact
Companies trying to build psychological safety obsess over survey scores. But are people taking more risks? Bringing up uncomfortable truths? Survey data won't tell you.
Culture efforts get measured by town hall attendance and communication touchpoints. Meanwhile, the real questions go unanswered: Is decision-making actually getting faster? Are silos breaking down? Are people working together differently?
Diversity and inclusion work tracks representation numbers and training completions religiously. But are underrepresented voices being heard in meetings? Are promotion processes becoming more equitable? Much harder to capture, but that's where the real progress happens.
The stuff that transforms how organizations work doesn't lend itself well to dashboards. The shifts in how people make decisions, the gradual build of trust that lets teams surface problems early, the evolution of informal networks that get real work done.
Why Packaged Solutions Always Win
Everyone understands why this happens. Leadership teams need proof that investments are working. Budgets require justification. Stakeholders want to see progress.
So companies design around what they can count. Metrics that feel substantial and that make presentations easier: training completions, survey improvements, participation rates.
But packaged organizational interventions offer the same fake clarity as processed foods. They promise quick results and neat tracking while missing the complexity that creates lasting change.
A company I recently worked with decided their product launches were taking too long because marketing, engineering and sales weren't talking to each other. So they created mixed project teams, tracked how many cross-departmental meetings were happening, and measured usage of their new collaboration platform.
Six months later, the dashboards looked fantastic. Yet product launches were still behind schedule and teams were still surprised by each other's priorities. The initiative had checked every measurement box while changing almost nothing about how work actually flowed.
What Effective Change Actually Looks Like
The interventions that work are harder to measure but impossible to ignore once they take hold.
Real change happens when people make different choices about how they spend their time and attention. When teams catch problems before they become crises. When informal conversations solve issues that used to require formal escalation.
These shifts don't happen through programs. They happen in the spaces between formal efforts. How someone frames a problem. Impromptu conversations that shift perspectives. Small moments that gradually change how people show up.
And they build on each other. Better information flow leads to smarter decisions. Smarter decisions build confidence. Confident teams take on harder challenges. Harder challenges force innovation. The cycle compounds.
Try building a dashboard around that.
Looking for Glimmers Instead of Metrics
This doesn't mean giving up on measurement. It means getting smarter about what signals actually matter.
Instead of dramatic before-and-after metrics, watch for glimmers. Small signals that deeper shifts are happening.
Language changes first. When people ask different questions or frame problems in new ways, their thinking is shifting. When teams use different words to describe their work, their mental models are evolving.
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Then behavior patterns shift. Who's speaking up more in meetings? Who's seeking input before making decisions? Which conflicts are getting addressed directly instead of swept under the rug?
Relationships are the real indicator. Are handoffs between teams smoother? Are people bringing problems forward earlier instead of waiting until crisis mode? Is collaboration happening without someone having to orchestrate it?
These glimmers won't make a CFO happy. But they predict the outcomes that eventually will.
Choosing Nutrition Over Convenience
What does this look like in practice?
Take the company with the slow product launches: Instead of counting meetings and tracking platform usage, they took a step back and discovered the real issue wasn't volume – it was substance. Marketing, engineering and sales were meeting plenty, but those meetings were full of conflicting goals and success metrics.
The fix was developing the capacity to explore problems together instead of defaulting to blame. Learning to represent customer needs while respecting technical realities. Getting leadership agreement on shared success metrics. Six months later, the teams were still meeting frequently. But they were planning together instead of arguing. Product launches started hitting their targets.
For your company, start with what would make the biggest difference in how teams solve problems or make decisions, not what's easiest to measure. Then figure out how to track progress toward that. Not the other way around.
Focus on how systems interact, not just individual behaviors. The most powerful interventions improve how information flows, how decisions get made, how teams coordinate. The connective tissue that determines whether an organization can adapt and respond.
Track momentum, not completion. Are new approaches gaining traction? Are people sticking with changes when things get difficult? Is the change creating positive cycles that reinforce themselves?
This requires a different kind of organizational courage. The willingness to invest in interventions that can't prove their worth in neat quarterly slides. The backbone to defend approaches that build long-term capability instead of short-term metrics.
The Real ROI Lives in the Unmeasurable
The best organizational interventions create adaptive capacity that shows up when it matters most. During crises, major shifts or when teams face challenges they've never seen before.
That resilience, that agility, that ability to handle whatever comes next? It doesn't come from programs you can easily track. It comes from the messy, complex work that changes how people think and work together.
Organizations serious about real change need to get comfortable with this reality. Just like choosing whole foods over processed alternatives, choosing effective interventions over easily measured ones requires trusting that impact matters more than convenience.
Because when it comes to building organizational capability, measurement be damned. The real work happens in the spaces between the metrics.
Editor's Note: For other thoughts on change management and metrics that matter:
- Change Management When Employees Are Exhausted by Change — If your transformation efforts are meeting with more than the usual headwinds, it might be due to immunity to change, not resistance.
- Drowning in Data, Starving for Insight — The excess of data we have in our workplaces hasn't resulted in better or smarter decisions. Learn how you can find the signal in the data noise.
- Making Change Stick at the U.S. Air Force — Air Force enterprise change manager Heather Knuffke gives an inside look at the digital transformation underway at the U.S. Air Force.
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