I feel like this article, and the discussion here, is conflating two different ideas. - If I measure what I do, that helps me know I'm actually accomplishing w

I feel like this article, and the discussion here, is conflating two different ideas. - If I measure what I do, that helps me know I'm actually accomplishing what I hope to accomplish. - If someone higher up in the organisation reads the measurements I have produced for myself, they get confused at best. In practise, the effect is often that they are actively mislead by the numbers. The difference is local context. It's easy to improve work by measurement if you're close to the work and understand all the nuances of it. Constructing measurements that can convey all the necessary context easily takes more time than just doing the job, sometimes multiples of it. (As can be seen by the proportionally growing body of administrators in any reasonably large corporation.) This goes back to Deming, of course. The more fundamental difference is the presence of theory. Theory is what you get when you combine measurements with an appropriate mental model of the situation -- something front-line workers can do, but executives do not have the necessary experience for. Numbers in the absence of theory (what executives have) are worse than useless: they're like driving on the highway by looking at the centre line in the rear view mirror. Numbers in the presence of theory (what front-line workers have) is the backbone of any good operation.