The Value of Reality

A White Paper on Metrics, Power, and the Survival of Innovation

Abstract

This white paper analyzes how dashboards and performance metrics invert their role: from aids to decision-making into systems of control that reward legibility. Once an enterprise begins to govern by proxies, the space of what “counts” narrows to what those proxies can register. Innovations that fall outside the frame are discounted, not because they lack value, but because they are illegible to the metric system itself. The result is that organizations end up optimizing for metrics rather than conditions, creating environments where apparent success is certified while substantive value is excluded from view. Metrics no longer measure reality, they delimit it.

The analysis then turns to the survival problem faced by innovators. When systems are structured to reward only what fits the proxy regime, any attempt to reconnect measures to ground truth is treated as destabilizing. Suppression follows: narrative counter-artillery, incentive gradients, and regulatory capture form an im…