Messy Middle Comics #008 — Operational Chaos & Accountability
And the award for Most Elaborate Dashboard That Nobody Uses goes to… the marketing team, again.
The dashboard has 47 metrics. The CMO looks at three. Nobody can explain what the other 44 measure or why they’re there.
This is Measurement Theater: the practice of building elaborate reporting infrastructure that exists primarily to prove you’re being rigorous, not to actually improve decisions.
The AI tools made it worse. Now you can generate dashboards FASTER — which means more metrics, more charts, more slides, more reviews of data that doesn’t change anything. The speed of insight without the substance of insight.
The uncomfortable question: if you removed 80% of your metrics tomorrow, would anyone make a different decision? If the answer is no, those metrics exist for performance, not performance improvement.
Messy Middle Comics — A gimmefy Production.
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