Every leadership team that asks for “more visibility” ends up with the same result: a dashboard with 40 indicators and a monthly meeting where nobody decides anything. The instinct says more data means more control. In practice it’s the opposite — every new indicator competes for the same finite attention in the room, and diluted attention doesn’t decide, it just watches.
The problem isn’t lack of data. Companies of any size today have more data available than at any point in history — and AI tools have made it trivial to generate a new chart for any metric in minutes. That ease is exactly what feeds the excess: when creating an indicator has never been cheaper, nobody stops to ask whether that specific indicator should exist in the first place.
The meeting that reviews everything and decides nothing
Picture the leadership team of a mid-sized company that prides itself on being “data-driven.” Every Monday, the leadership meeting opens with a 40-indicator dashboard: revenue, churn, NPS, average response time, number of leads, conversion rate by channel, social media engagement, headcount, absenteeism, internal satisfaction, and more. Getting through all 40 eats up nearly the entire meeting. Each department presents its own numbers, the room agrees things are “stable” or “worth watching,” and the agenda moves on.
Months later, someone asks: of the last twenty meetings, how many concrete decisions — switching a vendor, changing a price, reallocating budget, killing an initiative — came directly from a number seen on that dashboard? The answer, once someone bothers to check, is usually uncomfortably low. The dashboard wasn’t technically wrong. It was being used as a tracking ritual, not as decision input — and nobody had noticed the difference, because from inside the room the two look identical.
A vanity indicator is not the same as a decision indicator
That’s the distinction separating the two types of numbers that coexist on any bloated dashboard. A vanity indicator is comfortable to present — it usually trends upward over time and reads well in a report, but it doesn’t change what anyone does the following Monday, because no specific decision is tied to it. A decision indicator is the opposite: it has a defined trigger (“if it drops below X, we cut Y” or “if it rises above Z, we invest in W”) and a named person responsible for pulling that trigger when the number moves.
Most corporate dashboards are dominated by the first type not because of incompetence, but because vanity indicators are easier to produce — they don’t require anyone to commit to a threshold or publicly own the responsibility to act once it’s crossed. A decision indicator forces someone to state, before the fact happens, what they’ll do when it does. That’s uncomfortable. Which is why there’s so much of the first type and so little of the second.
As João Paulo Batistella, an innovation executive and former CEO of EISA, argues, a leadership meeting can’t be limited to reviewing the period’s report — the role of a diligent board or leadership team is precisely to resist the comfort of “look at the number and move on” and demand that every item on the agenda be tied to a real decision, not a tracking ritual.
The one-question test to prune the dashboard
There’s a simple test to separate the two types, indicator by indicator: “if this number changed significantly tomorrow, what specific decision would that trigger — and who, specifically, would make it?” If the answer is clear and named (“we’d cut the investment in X, the sales director’s call”), the indicator stays. If the answer is vague — “we’d keep an eye on it,” “it would be a warning sign” — or if nobody can say who would act, that number doesn’t belong on the decision dashboard. It can keep living in some operational report, but it shouldn’t take up time in the leadership meeting.
Applied rigorously, this test usually cuts a 40-indicator dashboard down to 6 or 10 — not because the rest is useless as raw data, but because the rest isn’t raw material for leadership decisions, and a leadership meeting should be about deciding, not inventorying. The question works the same way in any area: finance, product, operations, people. The criterion is never “this is interesting to know,” it’s “this changes what a named person will do.”
One caveat: this rigor applies to the metric that reaches the leadership decision table, not to every piece of data a company collects. An operations team can — and should — track dozens of granular metrics day to day to adjust its own work. The problem isn’t the metric existing somewhere. It’s the metric climbing, unfiltered, all the way to a meeting that should be deciding, not watching.
Fewer indicators at the decision table isn’t less control. It’s recognizing that control never came from the volume of numbers seen — it came from knowing, before looking, what each number, if it moves, will make the company do differently.
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