You just described objective tools after straw manning instrumentable problems as the only objective ones. Your problem is you're conflating 'subjective' with

You just described objective tools after straw manning instrumentable problems as the only objective ones. Your problem is you're conflating 'subjective' with 'not instrumentable'. Your name is subjective. You can be in an empty white room and choose it and it will always be correct. So is your favourite colour, or whether you think titanic was good. You can't have a subjective opinion and be wrong (although you can make an assertion about one and learn later that you were confused or that your opinion changed) Once again, the strategy for achieving your goals once they are picked is objective. If you sit in an empty white room and decide the correct strategy for your software business to succeed in your goal of having a product used by a million people is to fire all your experienced employees, hire apprentice chefs, and instruct them to spend all of their time writing poems by hand you're almost definitely wrong. The post hoc knowledge is proof that it's objective, not proof that it's reducible in its entirety to a simplified metric. Metrics are a tool for dealing with some objective problems, so are "your experience, your people skills, and your ability to adapt to new situations". Measurements can also include having a conversation or reviewing someone's work but not trying to reduce it to a small set of numbers. You need to make some measurements to know if you're in touch with reality, but throwing out everything except some tiny subset of measurements that fit in a policy doc or a kpi outline is just as stupid as making decisions from your white room with no feedback.