When Good News Becomes a Requirement

Essay · Institutions · 2 min read

By Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad

An organisation loses its senses when accurate reporting threatens the person doing it.

Imagine a team rewarded for keeping a performance indicator green. A difficult month arrives. Staff can report the problem, reinterpret borderline cases or delay entering inconvenient information. No one needs to instruct dishonesty explicitly. The organisation has made good news safer than useful news.

Measurement is necessary. Without it, serious failures can hide behind confident anecdote. But indicators are representations of work, and representations become vulnerable when careers depend on their appearance more directly than on the conditions they describe.

The danger is not confined to deliberate manipulation. People can sincerely adjust their attention towards what counts. Work outside the metric becomes harder to defend, and warnings without a numerical home struggle to enter the discussion.

Leaders often say they want candour. The test is their response to the first unwelcome result. If explanation is treated as excuse and difficulty as personal disloyalty, the next report will arrive cleaner. It may also arrive less true.

The answer is not to remove accountability. Poor outcomes still require investigation and improvement. But diagnosis must distinguish the person revealing a problem from the person responsible for causing or ignoring it. Otherwise measurement teaches concealment.

Multiple forms of evidence help: outcome data, case review, staff observations and the experiences of service users. Disagreement between them is valuable information. A dashboard should prompt questions rather than end them.

There is a cost to tolerating ambiguity. Decision makers may feel less certain, and comparisons become harder. Yet false certainty is more expensive when it directs action towards a world the indicators have invented.

The institution needs reports that can disappoint it. A permanently reassuring information system is not necessarily evidence of excellent performance. It may be evidence that the organisation has trained its own senses to look away.