Against the dashboard

The dashboard was supposed to reduce work. Instead it created a new job: watching the dashboard. A short argument about why looking is not the same as knowing.

A dashboard answers questions you already knew to ask. It is a frozen set of someone's past concerns, rendered in charts, waiting for you to interpret them. The moment your real question falls outside that frame, the dashboard is silent — and you are back to exporting the data and working it out yourself.

Looking is not knowing

The promise was visibility. The delivery was a standing obligation to look, plus the quiet anxiety that the thing that matters is happening in a chart you did not think to build. Attention is the scarce resource, and the dashboard spends it generously.

We would rather the system tell you when something deserves your attention, in the terms you actually care about, than ask you to keep watching in case it does.