Every company has its mantra. The words are everywhere — etched on glass walls, printed on mugs, glowing on the opening slide of every deck. Mission. Vision. Values. Once they anchored direction; now they feel like set dressing. Words rehearsed until they lose their meaning, repeated until their only function is applause.
Metrics filled the vacuum those words left behind. Dashboards multiplied. KPIs became the lingua franca of credibility — easy to recite, easier to manipulate. They made progress visible, even when nothing was actually moving. When a target is easier to game than to reach, performance becomes a pantomime.
Somewhere between the slogans and the spreadsheets, meaning slipped. We’ve learned to speak the language of progress without ever leaving the dressing room. And every quarter, every rebrand, every “alignment session” adds another layer of polish to a story no one truly believes.
Scenario: The Briefing Loop
Situation
In the days before the autumn budget, the government’s press office hums with the tension of performance week.
Statements are drafted, rehearsed, redrafted. Every word must “reassure the markets” while avoiding the appearance of panic.
The mission: project control, even when the numbers say otherwise.
Impact
Behind the podium’s polish sits exhaustion. Approval ratings have become the office’s primary KPI — a metric of sentiment detached from the realities it’s supposed to reflect.
Housing costs, fuel prices, and stagnating wages feel abstract in a room calibrated to track headlines, not households.
Tension
The language no longer describes the economy — it performs it.
“Short-term pain.”
“Fiscal responsibility.”
“Growing the economy.”
The same phrases circle endlessly through comms channels like well-worn props. The intention is for each iteration to buy a few more hours of calm, a few more inches of credibility.
Approach
A mid-level communications officer watches her team craft another statement that says everything yet explains nothing.
She tweaks a paragraph to sound “steady,” shifts a verb to sound “confident,” and hits send — not because it will change anything, but because it will test well.
Resolution
When the story breaks the next morning, the markets remain unconvinced, the electorate unmoved. But the report that lands in her inbox tells a different story: Engagement up 7%. Positive sentiment up 3%.
The campaign is a success — at least on paper. She updates the dashboard and sighs, quietly aware that her KPI went up while the country went down.
The gap between communication and consequence isn’t just political — it’s systemic. The machinery of productivity now measures how well we manage perception, not how effectively we deliver progress.
In business as much as in government, the same theatre plays out: language used not to illuminate truth but to simulate it. We’ve built systems that reward coherence of message over coherence of meaning — and the only metric that grows reliably is noise.
Targets Without Traction
There’s a paradox at the heart of modern productivity: the more precisely we measure performance, the less clearly we seem to understand it. Every initiative spawns a new metric — a dashboard here, a weekly review there — until progress becomes indistinguishable from data noise. What once clarified purpose now competes for attention with a hundred other “priorities.”
Cognitive Load Theory explains why. Working memory — the part of the brain that juggles active goals — is finite. When organisations overload it with overlapping targets, language, and frameworks, focus fragments. People spend their best hours decoding which signal matters rather than acting on any of them. It’s not incompetence; it’s bandwidth theft. The brain is designed for sequencing, not simultaneous sprints.
So teams compensate. They simplify the narrative — not the work, but the story about the work. Complex projects are reduced to traffic lights and vanity charts because red, amber, green fits neatly on one slide. Yet every simplification adds distance between action and outcome. Managers report progress that feels coherent even when the team beneath them is drowning in ambiguity. The system hums with motion but achieves little traction.
And still, the metrics multiply. Because in a culture addicted to visibility, the appearance of control feels safer than the uncertainty of trust. The more noise we generate, the more productive we feel. But cognitive overload doesn’t scale; it corrodes. The clarity that metrics promise only arrives when we have the courage to measure less — and mean it.
When KPIs Become Camouflage
Once attention is fractured, manipulation becomes effortless. In every system bloated with data, there’s always someone who learns how to make the noise work for them. KPIs are the perfect cover — simple, quantifiable, and reassuringly legible. They reward motion, not meaning. You don’t have to fix the problem; you just have to show movement on the chart.
OKRs were supposed to be the antidote — a framework that tied aspiration to evidence. The “Objective” was meant to articulate ambition; the “Key Result” was meant to prove impact. But when language inflates and attention thins, even OKRs start to mimic the KPIs they were designed to surpass. The ambition remains qualitative, the results decorative. What gets tracked isn’t learning or leverage, but optics.
That’s why the most politically fluent people — in corporations or in government — rise so quickly. They’ve mastered the art of interpretive performance: giving each metric just enough lift to signal control while leaving the real issues untouched. KPIs become camouflage for stagnation, a glossy skin stretched over structural rot. The team hits its numbers; the system keeps drifting.
The tragedy is that everyone involved can feel it. Meetings become rituals of reassurance. Reports celebrate completion, not consequence. And slowly, quietly, language stops pointing at reality altogether — it starts pointing back at itself. Progress becomes a self-referential echo, impossible to challenge without sounding cynical. By the time anyone notices the emptiness behind the numbers, the dashboards are already green.
The Theatre of Progress
Every system needs belief to function. The illusion of progress can carry people surprisingly far — until they realise the finish line keeps moving. The Goal-Gradient Effect shows that humans push harder as they near completion; the closer we feel to a goal, the more energy we invest. But in most organisations, the goal is a mirage — endlessly reframed, deferred, or renamed. The chase continues, the satisfaction never lands.
This is the theatre of progress: a culture built on simulated proximity. Each quarter brings a new initiative, a new “transformation,” a new poster declaring success just around the corner. Leaders speak of momentum, not milestones; of acceleration, not arrival. Motion is rewarded because motion feels alive — and yet, the faster everyone moves, the less anyone seems to arrive anywhere.
The damage isn’t just operational, it’s emotional. When the language of achievement keeps promising impact that never materialises, belief collapses. Teams grow cynical, not lazy. They stop accelerating because they’ve learned the scenery never changes. The scoreboard still flashes upward, but the players have long stopped looking. What began as motivation becomes mimicry — a ritual of progress performed for an audience that no longer claps.
Real productivity doesn’t demand constant acceleration; it demands closure. Goals that end, mean something, and allow reflection before the next begins. Without that punctuation mark, organisations drift into perpetual rehearsal — always preparing to deliver, never quite performing the play.
Conclusion: Clarity as a Measure of Motion
We live in systems that mistake performance for progress. The metrics keep multiplying, the language keeps stretching, and the gap between what’s said and what’s done keeps widening. But seeing that gap clearly is not cause for despair — it’s a map.
Every illusion exposed is an opportunity to realign. When you understand how cognitive overload dulls intent, how KPIs conceal rather than reveal, and how perpetual motion erodes motivation, you’ve already reclaimed the first scarce resource of any productive system: attention. Clarity is not the enemy of ambition; it’s the discipline that gives ambition form.
The solution isn’t to measure less, but to measure honestly. To ask of every target: does this metric describe reality, or decorate it? Does it reduce complexity or merely rename it? Does it tell the truth when nobody’s watching? When organisations dare to answer those questions out loud, language begins to regain its gravity.
Progress, it turns out, isn’t what we track — it’s what we trust.
And trust is built the same way everything meaningful is built: by saying less, meaning more, and ensuring that every word still points to something real.
Strategic Markers
Reclaiming Progress
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Measurement without meaning is noise.
Every new target competes for the same finite attention — and fragments it. -
Progress reports are not progress.
Dashboards soothe anxiety but rarely move outcomes. -
KPIs reward the visible; OKRs reveal the real.
Optics can be gamed — outcomes cannot. -
Perpetual motion isn’t momentum.
Speed feels productive right up until you realise you’re running in circles. -
Clarity isn’t a constraint — it’s a catalyst.
Meaning scales only when language earns its precision.
