Engagement came in at 7.9, up from 7.6. You scroll to the comments, and the third one describes a team you don’t recognize.

The tempting move is to let the average outvote the comment. Worth pausing there. Most leaders know Goodhart’s law: make a measure a target and people will game it. Accounting researchers Willie Choi, Gary Hecht and Bill Tayler documented something stranger. In their experiments, managers rewarded on a customer satisfaction score didn’t game it; they sincerely came to treat the score as the thing itself. They called it surrogation. Nobody pretends. The measure takes the goal’s place in people’s minds, and nobody notices the swap.

In any meeting where they compete, the number beats the experience. Engagement is ambiguous, slow, awkward to discuss; 7.9 fits on a slide and compares cleanly with last quarter. So each cycle the number absorbs more of the conversation, and the team slowly loses its vocabulary for the experience underneath. The instrument softens too: people learn which answers summon workshops and which reflect on a manager they like. The score improves as it empties out. And the better it looks, the less appetite there is for a second question.

People quote their score to me from memory. What it changed, they have to look up.

So reverse your next results meeting. Sentences first: what got heavier this quarter, what got lighter. Show the number last, and treat the distance between the two as the finding.

When did a good number last talk you out of a concern you were already holding?