The Altar of the Dashboard and the Death of Decision
The glare of the monitor is doing something to my retinas that probably violates a labor law in at least 49 countries. It is 2:09 PM, and I am staring at a line graph that has been trending upward for exactly 9 weeks, yet somehow, the room feels like it is sinking. We are in Conference Room B-the one with the broken thermostat that keeps the air at a crisp 19 degrees-and the silence is heavy enough to crush a ribcage. On the screen, a PowerPoint slide displays 12 different charts. They are beautiful. They are colorful. They represent $799,000 worth of data-collection infrastructure.
Mark, the VP of something involving a lot of syllables, clears his throat. ‘So,’ he says, his voice bouncing off the glass walls. ‘Based on the Q3 throughput metrics and the normalized churn coefficients, do we approve the expansion funding?’
Nobody moves. We all just keep looking at the charts. We are looking for an answer that isn’t there. We are waiting for the data to grow a mouth and tell us what to do, but data is a mute witness. It can tell you where you’ve been, and it can guess where you’re going, but it doesn’t have the skin in the game. It doesn’t feel the cold.
The Moment of Confession
I feel a vibration











