What Gets Measured Isn't What Did the Work
The most important changes don't have a number.
The Oakland A’s scouts had a list. Tools, they called it. Arm strength. Foot speed. Whether a kid had a good face for baseball. Billy Beane had a spreadsheet. On-base percentage. Walks per at-bat. Runners left on base.
The scouts were measuring everything they could see. Billy was measuring something the scouts’ system couldn’t find. Both systems worked fine. They just weren’t looking at the same thing.
A few years ago, I spent months working on a positioning framework for a company that needed a new story. Not a campaign. Not a deck. The question underneath everything. What is this actually, and why does it matter in a way nobody else can claim?
Nobody could measure that work while it was happening. You can’t put a number on the story the whole industry eventually tells. By the time the category existed, by the time the positioning had become the way the company thought about itself, the work had disappeared into the thinking. What you could measure were the campaigns that came after. The pipeline. The win rates. Those went in the report.
The foundation didn’t.
At LiveRamp, there were two kinds of clients. The first group used the product for their own marketing. Better targeting, cleaner data, more efficient campaigns. Real value, clearly measurable. They could tell you exactly what LiveRamp contributed to their results. To them, we were a vendor that made their campaigns work better. Clean attribution. Good ROI. They optimized the contract.
The second group was building something on top of the infrastructure. New products that couldn’t exist without the data connectivity underneath them. New business lines that required a partner who understood what they were trying to do. They brought LiveRamp in early, not because they’d measured the ROI of doing so, but because they couldn’t build what they were building without it. To them, we were load-bearing. They couldn’t have told you what LiveRamp was worth because the thing they were building didn’t exist yet without it. But once they built it, LiveRamp wasn’t a vendor to them. They were a partner who enabled something new entirely.
The first group had existing measurements. The second group built something new and, indirectly, tied us to revenue growth as part of the foundation that made the new revenue possible.
The measurement system didn’t fail the second group. It just couldn’t see what they were doing.
I’ve learned this in my own body, too. A few years ago, I changed almost everything about how I live. For months, the tracking said nothing was working. The scale went up. I felt worse, not better. There was no signal that anything underneath was shifting. And then everything changed at once, not one thing, everything.
But even when things did change, the measurement system wouldn’t have captured the most important ones anyway. My energy. My cravings. My mental health. The way I thought about the years ahead. My skin, my face, things I never would have thought to track, and honestly, I don’t think you can. None of that goes in a report. None of it has a number. But those were the changes that mattered most.
The outside only ever shows you what’s already finished compounding.
Billy’s spreadsheet didn’t survive as a spreadsheet. It survived as a streak of 20 consecutive wins, and every front office in baseball rethought how they valued players. The positioning framework I spent months on didn’t survive as a framework. It survived as the way a company thought about itself, and eventually, the way an industry told its own story. The LiveRamp clients who were building something new couldn’t tell you what the infrastructure was worth while they were building on it. They could only tell you after, when the thing they built existed, and the foundation was already invisible underneath it.
None of that would have happened if anyone had pulled the plug when the measurement system said nothing was working.
The measurement system isn’t wrong about what it can see. It’s blind to what matters most. If you only do the work the system can track, the foundation never gets built.
What gets measured gets funded. What doesn’t get measured does the work that makes everything else possible.
IF YOU CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS EITHER
Watch: Ted Lasso, Season 1: Ted builds a culture when the standings say nothing is working. The culture is the thing that can’t go in a report. The wins come later because the foundation was already there.
This is the final essay in the invisible work series. If you’re just finding this, the full series is here.
If you’re new to my work, I recommend starting here to understand what The Layer Beneath is building towards.
Interested in the behind-the-scenes origin story of why I’m building this?
Read Notes from the Build to understand where the idea came from.
Check out my site to read more about the framework, the narrative lens, and me.
I love the connections you make in your writing. The idea that the measurement systems aren't wrong in what they are measuring but do not tell the whole story is so important. It reminds me of when I was an elementary school teacher and would have to administer standardized tests that could in no way measure the true growth I had seen in those little souls. There are so many invisible components that cannot be reflected in that type of measurement.
This hits that brutal moment where a woman realizes the work that has quietly rebuilt her body, business, or team will never show up in the dashboard, even though nothing visible would exist without it. It feels like permission to keep tending to the foundations her nervous system knows are working, instead of abandoning them just because the metrics arrive last.