Move the metrics conversation with Nathan off the tooling and onto the why - which metrics, which were discarded, and how the team is told the reason

Situation

Peter closed the Nathan 1:1 by resetting what he wants from the metrics workstream. He stood it on the foundation that if you do not measure it, it does not change. He then said Max document was a fine first cut and he does not know whether Nathan wants to use it, but that is not the conversation - it is not about what Butler shows. Butler is just building a tool and it will not show me the whys, and it is the whys I want to talk about. He named the specific agenda for the next 1:1: why this metric, why this metric, which metrics you have discarded, and how you are communicating them to your team so they understand why you are tracking certain things. He connected it to his standing complaint that he is not seeing the change in pace he wants and that pounding that drum gets him nowhere - he wants to engage in the concrete bits of what Nathan is holding people to and why, acknowledging that Nathan knows how his own org will respond to a given metric better than Peter does. Nathan took it further himself, saying he should start adding the why to the dashboard, and Peter agreed with a second reason: it keeps people from making an incorrect assumption about why you care and gaming it through misinterpretation rather than intent.

Reasoning

This is Purpose Is the Decision Procedure applied to Peter own management. He declines to review the artifact on its merits and instead restates what the artifact is for - the metric set is a communication instrument aimed at behaviour, so the reviewable thing is the rationale, not the dashboard. It is also a deliberate abandonment of an approach that was not working: exhortation about pace has no traction, so he is moving to the lever that does, which is what gets measured. And by insisting Nathan articulate the discards, he is testing whether there is a theory behind the set or just a collection.

Additional Context

The same doctrine surfaced independently in the Steve Wallace 1:1 the same day. Steve had shared an engineering ops scorecard with his team and reported it was already changing behaviour and cleaning up Jira, with Norm giving useful feedback on it. Peter response was that if you do not measure things they do not get done, and the minute you show people what you are going to measure, what you measure gets worked on almost every time. So Peter has one direct report already demonstrating the mechanism while he is asking the other for the reasoning behind it.

Observed Evidence

Direct quotes from both Friday 1:1s on 2026-08-21.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis