Your Dashboard Can Be Right and Still Miss What Matters
I read a lot of books about data. At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine took me somewhere different.
It begins with climate change and opens into larger questions about science, certainty, and how we respond when the world refuses to behave the way we expected.
I didn’t expect it to have much to say about my work. But it made me sit with a question I’m still turning over:
What happens when we start believing that what we can measure is all that matters?
I’ve spent 20 years helping mission-driven organizations use their data. I’ve seen what changes when leaders can finally see something clearly: a pattern they missed, an assumption that doesn’t hold up, people who have quietly slipped away.
I believe in that work. The book made me think harder about what we ask it to do.
Some things can be fixed. Others have to be faced.
One distinction I took from Hine is the difference between a problem and a predicament.
A problem has a solution. A confusing volunteer sign-up process is a problem. Find where people get stuck, improve the process, and see whether it helps.
A predicament asks something different of us. A community is changing. A generation engages differently. The funding model that sustained an organization for years no longer feels dependable.
There may be useful actions to take, but no single fix that makes the uncertainty disappear.
Leadership often rewards us for treating every challenge as something we can solve. So we ask for a strategy, a tool, another report.
Data can help us understand the situation. It can’t promise us a way back to how things used to be.
Sometimes seeing clearly means recognizing that we have a choice to make, even without certainty about the outcome.
Attendance isn’t belonging
The idea that stayed with me most is how easily we can mistake our picture of the world for the world itself.
In my work, that looks like this:
Attendance isn’t belonging.
Giving isn’t generosity.
A volunteer record isn’t purpose.
A dashboard isn’t your organization.
Those metrics matter. But each captures only part of what we hope to understand.
Someone can attend every week and still feel invisible. Someone can serve faithfully and be close to burning out. Giving can increase while coming from fewer and fewer households.
A number can be accurate while the story we tell about it is incomplete.
And that story affects what we do next.
If attendance becomes our definition of belonging, we may work harder to get people into a room without asking whether anyone knows their name. If volunteer participation becomes our definition of engagement, we may celebrate a full schedule while missing the exhausted people holding it together.
What we measure influences what we pursue. We need to be careful about what we teach ourselves to call success.
The question underneath the question
A leader asks, “Can you build a dashboard that shows attendance?”
Of course. But I want to know what prompted the request.
Are people quietly slipping away? Is a growing campus becoming harder to navigate? Are we reaching more people without helping them build relationships?
Each question could begin with the same attendance numbers and lead to very different work.
This is why the conversation before the dashboard matters so much. We need to understand what decision the information will help someone make and which parts of that decision require more than information.
Data can show that first-time visitors aren’t returning. It can’t decide what kind of community you want to be for them. That takes judgment, values, relationships, and conversation.
Sometimes another report helps. Sometimes we need to ask someone about their experience and listen to the answer.
Work worth doing
Another idea I took from Hine is that worthwhile work can begin close to home, with particular people and relationships, even when we don’t know how everything turns out.
Mission-driven leaders already live with this uncertainty.
You rarely see the full result of a meal served, a class taught, or a family welcomed. Some effects take years to appear. Some will never fit neatly into a report.
That doesn’t excuse us from evaluating our work. It asks us to be honest about what our evaluation can establish.
We can look for evidence, question our assumptions, and use our limited resources thoughtfully. We can also acknowledge that a measure of impact will always leave something out.
For me, that makes data work more demanding. We have to build useful measures and keep asking where they fall short.
A question for your leadership team
At your next leadership meeting, choose one metric you celebrate regularly.
Ask:
What does this number tell us, and what have we started assuming it tells us?
What does it reveal? What does it leave out? What would you need to ask the people behind it before calling it success?
You may leave with a better measure. You may leave with a different question.
Either could change the work you choose to do next.
