The KPI Trap: When Measuring Performance Hurts Decisions - with Ioannis P.

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.