Strategy Dashboards Are Being Rebuilt Around Friction, Not Progress

What’s happening

Strategy dashboards are no longer being treated as neutral reporting tools, but are instead being redesigned to change executive behaviour in the room.

Across strategy offices and PMOs, teams are deliberately altering dashboards to surface:

• uncomfortable constraints rather than polished progress

• trade-offs instead of aggregated status

• points of friction that require executive intervention

This shift creates less high-level summaries and more prompts that force discussion, escalation, or decision.

Rather than asking, “How are we tracking?”, dashboards are being used to ask, “What are we not dealing with?”

Why it matters

Dashboards shape what leaders talk about and what they ignore.

When dashboards focus on progress:

• conversations drift toward reassurance

• issues are framed as delivery problems

• intervention is delayed
  

When dashboards surface friction:

• trade-offs move into the open

• decisions are forced earlier

• accountability becomes collective, not defensive
  

Execution research consistently shows that leadership teams intervene too late not because they lack information, but because the information doesn’t demand action. Dashboards that surface friction can change that dynamic as they turn reporting into governance.

What to do next week

Audit your dashboard for behavioural signals. Ask: What does this dashboard encourage leaders to do... reassure, or intervene?

Introduce one “forced conversation” metric Examples:

• initiatives blocked pending executive decision

• dependencies outside the team’s control

• work continuing despite unresolved assumptions
  

Design for escalation, not explanation. Replace one slide that explains progress with one that requires a choice. Watch what changes in the room. If the conversation shifts from updates to decisions, the dashboard is doing its job.