Everyone in the Monday budget meeting looks at the same dashboard. The dashboard has activation metrics on it: spend, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate, refreshed to this morning. It does not have equity, because equity does not refresh to this morning. So the meeting is about activation, and the brand line gets cut, and nobody in the room feels they did anything unreasonable.
Daniel Kahneman gave the reason a name . He called it WYSIATI , what you see is all there is. The fast, intuitive part of the mind builds the most coherent story it can out of the evidence in front of it, and it does not stop to ask what is missing. Confidence comes from how well the visible facts fit together, not from whether the important facts are present. A dashboard is a coherent set of visible facts. That is what makes it dangerous in a budget meeting.
The screen becomes the room
Whatever a decision can be measured against becomes, for the people deciding, the whole of what is real. Equity is real, but it is off the screen, so it drops out of the argument.
For the people making the call, whatever is on the screen becomes the full extent of what is real. Equity is real. It is doing work every day, keeping your clicks cheap and your repeat customers coming back. But it is not on the screen, and a thing that is not on the screen does not get defended, because there is nothing to point at when someone asks for the number. The dashboard is not wrong. It shows one corner of the room accurately, and we read that corner as the whole room.
Available beats important
Activation metrics are easy to retrieve, so the mind treats them as more important. Equity effects are diffuse and lagged, so they feel less important, not because they are, but because they are hard to bring to mind.
There is a second Kahneman effect stacked on the first. People judge how important something is partly by how easily an example comes to mind . Activation metrics come to mind instantly; they are sitting in the dashboard, updated daily, easy to quote. Equity effects are diffuse, lagged, and spread across channels, so no clean example jumps up when you reach for one. The mind reads that difficulty as unimportance. Equity ends up judged less important, not because anyone weighed it against activation and found it lacking, but because nothing about it comes to mind when you reach for a number.
A thing that is not on the screen does not get defended, because there is nothing to point at when someone asks for the number.
The fix is not a better dashboard
Equity does not fit a weekly dashboard, because it builds too slowly to show up week to week. Instrumenting harder will not change that. Treat the dashboard as a window, not proof that equity has stopped working.
The tempting response is to demand a better dashboard, one that finally shows equity in real time. It will not come. Equity builds slowly and pays back over years, so a weekly screen was never going to catch it. So the fix is a habit, not a new metric: treat the dashboard as a window onto part of the business, and refuse to treat an empty space on it as proof that equity has stopped working. On the model, this is what pulls budget toward Activation. The room keeps moving spend to the corner the dashboard can show.
Before you cut the brand line because the dashboard does not show it working, ask a harder question. Could this dashboard show brand working, even if it were? If the honest answer is no, then the empty space where the number should be is not evidence against the brand. It is only the edge of the window.
Notes & references
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), on WYSIATI and System 1’s story-building. On my reading list.
- Kahneman, on the availability heuristic: judging frequency and importance by how easily instances are recalled.