KPIs: When 'Moving the Needle' Becomes a Magic Trick

We’ve all applauded dashboards while the actual work quietly slipped backward. This episode performs a forensic audit of KPIs and OKRs to expose how metrics can be used as theater—feelings dressed as targets—rather than tools for decision-making. Dr Disruptor skewers the euphemisms that let leadership celebrate motion without progress, and The Survivor supplies humane, tactical moves listeners can use immediately. You’ll learn five red flags of metric theater, a fast triage flow to decide which metrics deserve effort, and three copy-paste scripts to ask for a baseline, a named owner, and timebound success criteria. The episode also shows how to convert a vanity metric into a small experiment with a hypothesis and acceptance criteria. Practical, non-hostile, and actionable, this episode ends with a downloadable 'KPI Translation Layer' one-pager to paste into Slack or meeting notes. Visit the show site to grab the one-pager and submit your strangest dashboard moment.