Colorblind Metrics

It's wild that we've been making the same mistake for years.

Ancient Greek philosophers had a word: techne—the art of making things. They knew something we've forgotten: knowing HOW to count isn't the same as knowing WHAT counts.

Stay with me… this connects to everything.

Linear optimization incorrectly assumes every click, lead, and customer is the same.

But that's like saying every conversation is equal because they contain words or every friendship is identical because they involve two people.

We built beautiful counting machines with dashboards, analytics, and KPIs.

They're amazing at what they do, but they can only see what they're designed to see.

Imagine you're colorblind, but you don't know it. You create a system for organizing the world based on the shades you CAN see.

It works perfectly.

Until someone mentions "red" and "green" are different colors.

That's us with customers, relationships, and value.

We optimize for measurable metrics—clicks, conversions, growth rates—while the actual important stuff slips through our fingers like water:

Quality.
Fit.
Resonance.

The unmeasurable magic of "these are our people."

Here's what keeps me up at night: What if the problem is optimizing?

Not the execution.

The premise.

Optimization assumes a summit, peak performance, and a "best." But relationships aren't mountains to climb; they're gardens to tend.

And you can't optimize a garden.

(Ever try to make a flower bloom faster? Yeah.)

Maybe the question isn't "how do we optimize better?"

Maybe it's "what if we stopped optimizing and started attending?"

But how do you measure attending?

… And there's the trap, waiting for me to walk into.