Why every metric needs a named owner

A number earns its place on a screen when someone acts on it. Everything else takes room, and takes trust away from the figures that decide something.

In the Delete step we hold every metric a company reports against three tests.

Tied to a decision: someone is choosing between two courses, and this figure helps settle it.
Owned by someone: one named person, not a department.
Has a threshold: a value at which the answer changes.

In the companies we work with, the owner is the test that fails first. A decision can be reconstructed. A threshold can be set.

Naming the owner is the moment the metric starts costing someone their time.

An owner is whoever answers for the number

Lerner and Tetlock, in Psychological Bulletin, define accountability as “the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others.” An owner is not the person the report is sent to. It is the person who will be asked why the number moved, and what they did about it.

Nobody owns what everybody owns

Writing about his own 1968 study with Bibb Latané, John Darley records that it “demonstrated experimentally that the presence of others reduced an individual’s feelings of personal responsibility in an emergency situation.” Those were staged emergencies, not Monday reviews, and we will not stretch the finding past what it shows. The shape is familiar all the same to anyone who has watched a red figure sit on a slide while everyone assumed it belonged to someone else.

McKinsey describes a social network analysis at a global consumer company where “as many as 45 percent of interactions were found to be potentially inefficient, and 23 percent of the individuals involved in an average interaction added no value.” What the company did about it: break complex processes into key decisions, clarify roles for each one, and make one person accountable for each outcome. In the same article, a healthcare executive describes sitting through the same proposal three times, on separate committees, because no one knew who was authorized to approve the decision.

Why unowned numbers survive

MIT Sloan Management Review, in a 2018 report with Google built on a survey of more than 3,200 senior executives, found that “KPIs are regarded as ‘key’ in name only; the most prevalent attitude toward them seems to be one of compliance, not commitment.” The responses, the authors write, suggest this reflects cultural and organizational inertia rather than technical or operational limitations. No tool deletes a metric nobody was ever going to act on. A person does, by saying out loud that it was never used.

The limit of the idea

Naming an owner does not make a number true. Lerner and Tetlock are blunt about this: their review “underscores the falsity of the conventional wisdom … that accountability is a cognitive or social panacea.” One finding shapes how we apply it. People who are held accountable before they have committed to a position tend to think in more self-critical ways, weighing several perspectives and anticipating the objections reasonable others might raise. So the owner is named before the position hardens, and the threshold is written down at the same time. An owner with no threshold is holding a number and nothing else. Decoration with a name on it.

This is step 02, Delete, doing its work. The screen gets shorter, and what is left on it is worth reading.

A number without an owner is decoration.

An owner is whoever answers for the number

Nobody owns what everybody owns

Why unowned numbers survive

The limit of the idea

Sources