Your KPIs Are Lying to You. Here Is How to Catch Them in the Act.

Every organisation I have worked in has had a version of the same problem: the KPIs say performance is improving, but the organisation does not feel like it is improving. Costs are rising. Customer complaints are increasing. Employee morale is declining. And yet the dashboard shows green. Someone in the organisation is gaming the metrics, or the metrics are measuring the wrong things, or both.

This is not a minor problem. Organisations that are navigating by misleading metrics are making systematically wrong decisions — investing in the wrong areas, ignoring real problems, rewarding the wrong behaviours. The cost of bad metrics is not just analytical. It is operational and strategic.

How KPIs Lie: The Most Common Patterns

The Denominator Problem

Percentage metrics can be manipulated by changing the denominator rather than improving the numerator. Fault resolution rate improves — not because faults are being resolved faster, but because low-priority tickets are being closed without resolution. Customer satisfaction scores improve — not because service has improved, but because the survey is no longer being sent to the most dissatisfied customers. Whenever a percentage metric improves, the first question should be: did the numerator improve, or did the denominator change?

The Activity-Outcome Confusion

Many organisations measure activity when they should be measuring outcomes. Number of training sessions delivered instead of capability improvement. Number of system upgrades completed instead of system reliability improvement. Number of customer contacts made instead of customer issues resolved. Activity metrics are easy to hit and easy to game. Outcome metrics require genuine performance improvement.

I once sat in a performance review where an operations team proudly presented a 40 percent improvement in their fault response KPI. The metric measured time from fault report to first engineer dispatch. What it did not measure was whether the engineer actually fixed the fault. Customer outage duration — the outcome that actually mattered — had barely changed.

The Gaming Response

Any metric that is tied to rewards or consequences will be gamed. This is not a reflection of dishonesty — it is a rational response to incentive structures. When meter readers are measured on the number of readings taken per day, they take fast readings rather than accurate ones. When call centre agents are measured on average call handling time, they close calls rather than resolve issues. The solution is not better measurement of the same activities. It is measuring outcomes that cannot be easily gamed without actually improving performance.

How to Catch Lying KPIs

The most reliable method is triangulation — measuring the same underlying performance from multiple angles and looking for inconsistencies. If customer satisfaction scores are improving but customer complaint volumes are also increasing, something is wrong with one or both measurements. If energy losses are declining on paper but revenue per unit distributed is not improving, the loss reduction may not be real.

The second method is following the money. Financial outcomes are harder to game than operational metrics because they require actual cash to flow differently. If operational improvements are real, they should eventually show up in the financial accounts. When operational metrics improve but financial performance does not follow, the operational improvements are probably not real.

The third method is asking the people closest to the work. Front-line employees almost always know when the metrics are not reflecting reality. They are rarely asked. When you ask them directly and honestly, they will tell you what the dashboard cannot.

Dr. Sunny Okonkwo

AI Strategist · Decision Intelligence Expert · Digital Transformation Leader. Head of Data Analytics at one of Africa's largest energy and utility companies. Author of 7 books including the #1 International Bestseller The AI Alchemist. Keynote speaker at IIBA, Big Data Summit Canada, Global Summit, and UNICAF.