CEOs really love dashboards. And for good reason.
It’s a single screen, filled with graphs of all kinds, monitoring all your relevant KPIs, and gives you valuable insights into all promising trends. In short, it’s control.
However, here’s the uncomfortable truth: even the most comprehensive dashboard can be only an illusion of visibility.
That’s because most modern corporate dashboards only reflect what’s already happened, not what’s happening right now. It can be for various reasons, but all organizations see are summaries of the bigger picture. Absent from these summaries are the unseen layers, the delays, the distortions, and the disconnected signals that never made it into the decision-making considerations.
Comfort Of Data Presentation
One of the dashboards’ most seductive and impressive value propositions is just how simplified they make things. Clarity is the obvious benefit, made even more valuable in a business world ruled by complexity. However, this simplicity comes at a cost.
Data passing through multiple layers, teams, and departments is subject to various approval cycles. Consequently, the data becomes filtered, nuance is lost, urgency fades, and by the time the information is ready to be viewed, considered, and deployed into decision-making, it has already become outdated.
The CEO still sees a colorful summary, but the decision being made based on that summary is based on information that is outdated and may not reflect the current market reality. In short, what the CEO mistakes for visibility is really just comfort disguised as control.
Visibility Is Proximity, Not Access
Leaders often assume visibility to be access to all reports, analytics, and performance metrics summaries. And while they do comprise an important part of visibility, they are not direct synonyms. True visibility will always be incomplete without proximity. More accurately, proximity to current information.
It’s knowing what’s happening right now that carries the real importance for businesses rather than a quarterly report that tells what happened weeks or months ago. This allows a real-time gaze into which teams truly contribute to a positive ROI, which projects are underperforming, and most importantly, how talent across the organization is being used.
Without such proximity, dashboards only reflect interpretation.