The Number on the Board Is Already History
Why the metric everyone in your building can recite is the last thing you should be managing to.
Dylan Cease was on the mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Going into the ninth inning against the San Francisco Giants, he was one out away from a no-hitter.
The Giants got a hit. No-hitter gone.
After the game, the reporters crowded in with the questions you'd expect. How did it feel to lose it? What would you have done differently? Any regrets?
Cease's answer: "Really, I don't care about that. What I focus on is sequencing. It's simple, really."
Sequencing. Mixing up your pitches so the batter doesn't know what's coming. Fastball, curveball, changeup — in an order that keeps them off balance. That's the process. That's the leading indicator. The no-hitter — the thing every reporter in the room wanted to talk about — was the lagging indicator. The result. Carved in stone by the time anyone asks about it.
Dylan Cease understood something that most people running businesses don't: you can't change the score. You can only change what you do next.
I work with two kinds of companies. Small ones that have no metrics at all, and large ones that have too many.
In a small shop — five, ten, maybe fifteen people — the owner is completely focused on winning orders, getting product out the door, and getting revenue in. They have one metric: "make money." They don't think about it explicitly. They just work. My job there is to introduce some structure before the growth makes the lack of structure painful.
That's when I introduce leading and lagging indicators.
A lagging indicator is a result. Revenue for the year. Units shipped. Accident incident rate. These numbers tell you what happened. They don't tell you what to do. If you made $1.2 million in revenue last year, that number is set. You can't negotiate with it. You can't move it. It's done.
But ask an owner how they arrived at that revenue number, and something interesting happens. People start talking. The small change they made to the quoting process. The training one of the techs took that cut rework in half. The thirty-second "good job" in the hallway with a crew member who then ran through a wall to hit a deadline. Those are leading indicators. The things you can actually control. The things you can do more of — or less of — starting today.
In a large company, the problem runs the other direction. They know their lagging indicators by heart. Weekly sales number. Productivity percentage. Employee turnover rate. Injury frequency. These numbers get drilled in through dashboards, weekly huddles, and performance reviews. Leaders can recite them cold. And then they sit there, staring at the number that can't be changed, fretting when it's off, and never quite connecting it back to the action that would move it.
I've walked a lot of plant floors. When I ask a small-shop operator what metric they're focused on, I often get confusion, or something honest like "output per hour." When I ask the same question in a large operation, I get revenue or costs — the lagging indicators. Then I ask the follow-up: "What drives that number? What causes it to go up or down?"
That's where it gets quiet.
You're probably thinking: metrics are important. You can't manage what you don't measure. And you're right — I'm not arguing against measurement. Lagging indicators matter. Over time, they tell you whether you're going in the right direction. If revenue is trending down over three years, that's not a coincidence — it's a signal.
But there's a difference between using a lagging indicator as a navigational tool and using it as a management target. The first is useful. The second is where organizations go sideways.
When the weekly sales number is the thing the floor manager has memorized — not the leading actions that produce it — you get an operation full of people who can tell you exactly how bad the score is, and no idea what to do about it. People get promoted for knowing the lagging indicator cold. Reciting it in the right meeting keeps your job. Talking about the thirty-second "good job" you gave Meagan because she had a good idea? That sounds like you're not focused on the real thing.
But Meagan's idea is the real thing. The thirty seconds is the leading indicator.
When I'm on the floor with a large operation, I stop asking about the lagging indicator and start asking a different set of questions.
"What's the most important thing you want to get done today?"
"What causes that important thing to happen?"
"What can you do to make it happen?"
"What one action will you take — after this conversation ends — to make it happen?"
That's the whole framework. One question chain, answered honestly, with someone watching you commit to an answer. No dashboard required.
For smaller companies, it's the reverse: we build the structure together. You want $5 million in revenue this year? Good — that's your lagging indicator. Now tell me what creates revenue in your business. Proposals sent? Follow-up calls made? Jobs quoted within 24 hours? Pick the one that matters most, track it weekly, and watch what happens to the lagging indicator over time.
John Kay, in Obliquity, makes the case that complex goals — profit, growth, excellence — are almost never achieved by pursuing them directly. The companies that win obsess over the process, the craft, the daily actions. The results show up later, as a consequence. Cease doesn't pitch to throw a no-hitter. He pitches to sequence well. The no-hitter is what happens when sequencing is good enough for long enough.
This principle shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. A few weeks ago I wrote about culture being a lagging indicator of relationships — the culture you have is the result of thousands of small leadership actions made over months and years. You can't fix culture directly. You fix the daily behaviours that produce it. Same logic. Leading indicator, lagging result.
The organizations I've seen turn their numbers around — and this is consistent across every industry I've worked in — do it by picking one leading indicator, one action, and refusing to look away from it until everyone on the floor understands exactly how that action connects to profitability.
Not thirty indicators. One.
The lagging metrics always go up.
You can't change last month's numbers. You can change what you do today.
One next step: Pick one person on your team this week. Ask them: "What's the one thing that, if you did it consistently, would make the biggest difference in your output?" Write down their answer. That's your leading indicator. Track it for four weeks before you look at the lagging number again.
Further reading:
- Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly — John Kay (Penguin Press, 2011). The clearest argument I've found for why focusing on results — rather than the process that produces them — is a trap. Essential if you want to understand why leading indicators work, not just that they do.
- Atomic Habits — James Clear (Avery, 2018). Clear's central claim is that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. A goal is a lagging indicator. A habit is a leading one. The framing maps directly onto how operators should think about daily process.
- Good to Great — Jim Collins (HarperBusiness, 2001). The companies that made the leap from good to great didn't chase broad KPI dashboards. They found the one thing — one economic denominator, one disciplined focus — and compounded it relentlessly. Collins calls it the Hedgehog Concept. I call it picking your leading indicator and not blinking.