Up is good.

Down is good.

I can’t count how many times I saw those words on Air Force dashboards.

I sat through countless meetings reviewing performance metrics. Break Rates. Repeats. Recurs. FMC rates.

Many of the charts had graph with an arrow in the corner accompanied by one of those simple reminders.

That guidance always struck me as odd.

If someone reviewing the dashboard needs a reminder about whether a metric should go up or down, perhaps the metric isn’t telling the story as clearly as we think it is. If a decision maker needs guidance on whether the metric should be moving one way or another, maybe it’s not even an important thing to be tracking.

Which raises some larger questions:

What does a good dashboard actually look like?

How many KPIs should an organization be tracking?

There is no shortage of things to measure. In fact, many organizations today are moving toward hyper-tracking, collecting data on nearly every action an employee takes throughout the day.

The technology exists to measure almost everything.

The challenge is deciding what actually matters.

A dashboard should not be a collection of every metric available. It should be a decision-making tool.

The best dashboards answer three simple questions:

Are we winning?
Where are we struggling?
What action should we take next?

I’ve always believed every KPI should pass a simple test:

If the metric moves significantly tomorrow, what would I do differently?

If the answer is “nothing,” it probably doesn’t belong on the dashboard.

Too many organizations confuse measuring with managing.

More data isn’t always better.

Sometimes it’s just more data.

The goal isn’t to track everything.

The goal is to understand enough to make better decisions.