The KPI Trap: When Measuring Performance Hurts Decision Making | Ioannis P
Details
Executive dashboards often fail not because of bad data or poor tooling, but because of hidden measurement traps that distort decision-making. Drawing on real (anonymized) consulting experience and well-established ideas from behavioral economics, systems thinking, and management science, this session explores why technically correct KPIs can still lead organizations in the wrong direction.
Through a series of eye-opening “KPI traps” — such as aggregation illusions, metric surrogation, local optimization, and short-term bias — we will unpack how dashboards shape behavior, incentives, and strategic outcomes, often in unintended ways. The focus is not on Power BI features, but on how dashboards are designed, interpreted, and used at the executive level.
The session offers practical frameworks and design principles to help analytics professionals move from reporting metrics to enabling better decisions.
Ioannis is a fellow Power BI User Group leader — he runs the Athens Power BI User Group and co-leads the Berlin Power BI User Group:
https://www.meetup.com/athens-power-bi-user-group/
https://www.meetup.com/berlin-power-bi-user-group/
Ioannis Philippides is a Senior Marketing Consultant at TD Reply in Berlin, focused on Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and data visualization. He is also an active community organizer and speaker, leading both the Berlin and Athens Power BI User Groups and regularly presenting on topics around dashboard design, analytics, and business intelligence.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ioannis-philippides-powerbi-fabric/