Week 2 Stand-up: Rewarding A, hoping for B

Once a measure becomes a target it stops measuring anything. This week you find the measure your team is judged on and work out how to move it without doing anything.

4 March 2027

This week's trickSplit one ticket into five.

Who paysWhoever does the work the dashboard cannot count.

Every rating in the calibration room rests on numbers somebody collected: tickets closed, lines merged, incidents handled, story points burned. This stand-up is about what happens to a number once people know it is being watched.

Bring#

A dashboard, a sprint board, a leaderboard, anything a real team looks at to tell whether it is doing well. A screenshot is fine.

The trick#

Decompose deliverables into their smallest shippable increments and track each one independently. A feature that was one ticket becomes five, each with its own closure event. Velocity improves, throughput metrics trend up, and the dashboard reflects the granularity of your execution.

What happens#

You take the measure you brought and write down, in one column, what it was meant to stand for, and in the next column, three ways to move it that do not involve doing the thing it stands for. Then the group votes on which of the three a manager would notice. Usually none of them. Last, a fourth column: the work the measure was standing in for, which nobody counts and which gets done anyway, by someone. That column is who pays.

How you know it worked#

You can look at any number on any dashboard and say what it was supposed to mean, and you can no longer look at it without wondering who is being paid to move it.