Why Measurement Is Broken (And Why That’s Good News)

We live in a world that worships numbers. Data is the altar, dashboards the scripture, and analysts the priesthood. We tell ourselves that if something can be counted, it must be true. If it can’t, well, maybe it didn’t matter in the first place. That’s not science. That’s a cultural fixation dressed up as objectivity.

Measurement is broken. Not because numbers are useless, but because we’ve mistaken them for truth itself. And that’s good news. Because the cracks in our measurement culture are exactly where better thinking can begin.

The Cult of Quantification

Counting things is not new. What’s new is the obsession. Everything is quantified: steps, likes, sales quotas, “brand love.” The rise of quantification culture started centuries ago, but it metastasized with modern tech. Theodore Porter called this “trust in numbers” (Porter, Trust in Numbers, 1995): the idea that numbers are the only way to make messy decisions look objective.

The seduction is obvious. Numbers feel clean, sharp, definitive. They reduce chaos to something a quarterly report can digest. But what they actually do is flatten the world. The unquantifiable—relationships, creativity, trust—gets pushed aside as if it never existed.

When Numbers Pretend to Be Objective

Numbers don’t spring from the ether. They’re built on human choices: which data to collect, who gets left out, how questions are phrased. That means numbers are every bit as biased as the people behind them.

Goodhart’s Law spells out the trap: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The moment a test score, a quarterly sales number, or a social media metric becomes the north star, everything warps around it. Teachers stop teaching; they start test-prepping. Salespeople stop serving customers; they start gaming quotas. Social media teams stop building trust; they start chasing clicks. The measure eats the meaning.

Vanity, Addiction, and Self-Punishment

It isn’t just organizations. Individuals get caught too. Fitness trackers were supposed to promote healthy habits. Instead, they turned “10,000 steps” (a marketing gimmick invented in 1960s Japan, not a medical standard) into a guilt trip.

Social media made validation measurable—likes, shares, followers—and then engineered dopamine hits around them. Engagement became the coin of the realm, but it’s a coin that buys nothing. What looks like influence is often just noise amplified by an algorithm trained to reward outrage. Vanity metrics are the empty calories of measurement. Addictive, easy, and ultimately unsatisfying.

What Measurement Can’t Touch

Numbers collapse nuance. They can’t capture what makes a team resilient, what makes a relationship trustworthy, or why a piece of art matters. Business schools keep trying—Net Promoter Scores, employee engagement indexes—but the result is usually parody: a sterile shadow of the thing itself.

Life is full of things that resist quantification. Laughter. Awe. Courage. These are not fringe details; they’re the substance of human experience. Measurement can map the terrain, but it can’t tell you why you want to be there.

Broken on Purpose

Here’s the flip side: the failure of measurement is useful. Once you stop treating metrics as commandments, you can use them as what they really are—crude signals. You can balance leading indicators with lagging ones, combine numbers with stories, and ask better questions about what matters.

Companies like Patagonia and REI figured this out years ago. They integrated environmental sustainability into their dashboards not because it was easy to measure, but because ignoring it would bankrupt their future (Eccles & Klimenko, HBR, 2019). Broken measurement is a door cracked open.

The Corporate KPI Trap

Corporate America loves KPIs the way gamblers love slot machines: short-term thrills, long-term damage. Quarterly earnings targets drive cost-cutting frenzies that shred innovation pipelines. Marketing dashboards reward vanity reach over actual loyalty. Metrics are meant to guide, but in practice they become shackles.

The obsession with short-term numbers is why we see so many innovation casualties. Projects that don’t have immediate ROI die in committee. The irony is that the most transformative ideas—streaming media, renewable energy, even mRNA vaccines—were initially terrible by KPI standards.

Measurement in Education: A Case Study in Dysfunction

Education may be the purest example of measurement failure. Standardized testing was supposed to make learning more equitable. Instead, it reduced classrooms to assembly lines. Teachers became test-prep coaches. Students learned how to memorize, not how to think. Creativity, curiosity, and critical reasoning—the very skills societies claim to prize—were collateral damage.

Alternative assessments like portfolio reviews or project-based evaluation show us what’s possible. They capture depth, creativity, and growth in ways standardized metrics never could. But they’re harder to score, and so the fetish for simple numbers wins most of the time.

Social Media and the Numbers Game

Nowhere is the absurdity more obvious than online. We obsess over engagement numbers, as if likes equaled loyalty or shares equaled influence. Platforms feed this addiction because it keeps people scrolling. But the cost is enormous. What thrives in this ecosystem isn’t substance—it’s provocation. The algorithm doesn’t care whether content is true, constructive, or humane. It cares if you click. And so measurement drives dysfunction.

The Personal Measurement Trap

Self-improvement has also been hijacked. What begins as healthy curiosity—am I sleeping enough, exercising enough, focusing enough?—quickly becomes tyranny. Our self-worth gets tied to trackers and apps. Fail to hit a target, and suddenly you’re failing at life. Journaling, reflection, and qualitative self-assessments aren’t as sleek as dashboards, but they produce more humane results. Numbers should inform growth, not weaponize it.

Why Broken Is Good

The cracks in measurement culture are the best thing about it. They remind us that numbers are not reality—they are approximations. When you see measurement as broken, you’re free to do three things:

Reclaim judgment. Numbers should support decisions, not make them. Intuition and experience are not “unscientific”—they’re data points of another kind.
Value the qualitative. Stories, context, and lived experience often tell you more than a dashboard ever will.
Measure what matters. Innovation pipelines, trust, community, resilience—messy, yes, but crucial.

Wisdom Over Data

The future of measurement isn’t about bigger dashboards. It’s about cultivating wisdom: knowing when to measure, what to measure, and when to stop pretending that measurement is enough.

The paradox is that acknowledging the failure of measurement is the only way to salvage its value. Once the numbers lose their false aura of objectivity, they can go back to doing what they do best—illuminate part of the story, not replace it.

Measurement is broken. That’s the good news. Because only when we admit it can we start building a more honest, more human way of understanding the world.

Sources to Anchor Claims

Porter, Theodore. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Goodhart, Charles. “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience.” Papers in Monetary Economics (Reserve Bank of Australia), 1975.
Eccles, Robert & Klimenko, Svetlana. “The Investor Revolution.” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2019.
“The Origin of 10,000 Steps.” The Guardian, 2015.
Shoham, Amir & Finkelstein, Sydney. “Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don’t.” Harvard Business Review, 2019.