Monthly provocations and practices for transformational leaders. Disrupt the reactive cycle keeping you and your team stuck in the status quo to create real and sustainable change.
Are you measuring what matters?
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Throughout this year, we've explored what it takes to lead in this stunningly complex and volatile moment—defining clarity, reframing confidence, and rewarding intrinsic motivation. Now, as year-end approaches, we turn our attention to results. The business world organizes its assessment apparatus around what's easily quantifiable. Billable hours. Revenue reports. Performance reviews. Returns on investments. Days in the office. But the leaders who are transforming their organizations into healthy, high-performing cultures aren’t obsessing over dashboards. They know that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. They’re seeking out the kind of data that can’t be summed up on a spreadsheet. “We have to let go of the belief that what we can see and touch and name is more real and more relevant than what's not visible.”—Vanessa Zuisei Goddard METRICS X MEANINGAssessing the MessRussell Ackoff famously said, “Managers don't solve problems, they manage messes.” If we’re leading in a complex adaptive system—which is what all organizations are—we’re not dealing with neat challenges that yield to simple solutions. We’re navigating messes: overlapping issues, competing priorities, emergent dynamics that shift even as we try to understand them. So how do we know if we’re making progress? The conventional answer is: Check the metrics. Define the KPIs. Track the numbers. "What gets measured gets managed," we tell ourselves, as if saying it enough times will make it true. But ask any leadership team seeing their engagement scores plummet—how are they managing those results? Most of the time, the answer is: Not well. By the time a decline shows up in the hard data, it’s much harder to manage. When we rely on the usual metrics, a few things reliably happen:
But what if we've been asking the wrong question? Not “how do we measure change?” but “how do we recognize when change is happening?” This isn't about abandoning rigor. It's about expanding the scope of what we bring our rigorous attention to. Here’s what it looks like: 3 Examples at 3 ScalesSCALE 1: PERSONALImagine you start a new exercise routine with the goal of losing 10 pounds. For three months, you do everything right, showing up consistently and pushing yourself to bring your all to your workout. And the scale doesn’t budge. According to the primary metric you’d chosen, you would be failing. But your body tells a different story. You have more energy. You move with greater ease. Your clothes fit better. You feel stronger, clearer, more capable. Do you trust the number, or the evidence your body is giving you? It turns out you’ve been gaining muscle as you burn fat. The composition of your body is changing, even though the total mass stayed roughly the same. The scale is capturing something, but maybe not the thing that matters. SCALE 2: PROFESSIONALWhen I launched RadiantLeader.co, someone asked me what success looked like. I panicked a little and blurted out, "100 members in the first year." The moment I said it, I felt the wrongness of it. Size doesn't matter to me. What matters is value—whether this space is genuinely useful to the leaders who show up. But I'd internalized the "more is better" logic, so I started optimizing for growth. I added community membership onto other offerings. Coaching clients got access as part of our work together. Leaders from teams I facilitated joined automatically. The numbers went up. And the community felt hollow. Why? Because the people I'd added hadn't chosen to be there. They were passive recipients, not active participants. You can't build a community by assignment. Earlier this year, those add-on memberships expired. Overnight, our membership dropped by 30%. And I breathed a massive sigh of relief. Because now I knew everyone in our community of practice—currently 30 leaders around the world—has made an intentional, professional decision to join. They show up not because someone gave them access, but because they've chosen to be there. So how do I know if the community is successful? I pay attention to what people do. Members are referring colleagues—staking their professional reputation on this space being valuable. Leaders are applying these paradigm shifts in real moments: difficult conversations, strategic pivots, team conflicts. And these ideas are traveling beyond our direct conversations, rippling outward as members bring these frameworks to their teams. In other words, I'm measuring what actually indicates value, not what's convenient to count. SCALE 3: SYSTEMICTwo organizations have merged. The integration plan was detailed, the timeline ambitious, the stakes high. Six months in, the leadership team reviews the dashboard. Everything is green. 🟢 Systems consolidated 🟢 Redundancies eliminated 🟢 Cost synergies realized 🟢 Integration milestones met They congratulate themselves: Mission accomplished. But something feels off. The hallways are quiet, even when full of people. People are talking about one another, rather than to one another. Every day is jammed with meetings-after-the-meetings. The cultures are clashing. Trust is eroding. Talented people are quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles. Innovation has stalled because no one wants to be the first to fail in this new uncertain environment. The spreadsheet says success. The system says crisis. Which is true? Both. And that's exactly the problem. Leadership is attending to lagging indicators—the integration checklist, the systems cutover, the streamlined org chart—while ignoring leading indicators: engagement, psychological safety, trust. By the time those leading indicators show up in the numbers—when attrition spikes, when collaboration stalls, when promised synergies fail to materialize—the damage will be done. The culture clash isn’t unmeasurable. It’s just invisible to leaders who are solely focused on metrics. The question isn’t whether integration happened, but whether it created the value it promised. Are you seeing yourself in any of these stories? Join the November mini-retreat to dig deeper into real results. 👇 November Mini-Retreat: Assess the MessChange isn't linear, and neither is how we measure it. We need to look beyond traditional metrics to see the full story of transformation. In this Mini-Retreat, you’ll track progress across multiple, often overlooked dimensions, celebrate "messy" middle stages, and recognize growth that traditional measurements miss. As we close this year, we'll acknowledge how far we've come—not just in what we've achieved, but in who we've become. Friday, November 14, 2025 Zoom link sent upon registration
Reminder: Mini-Retreats are free for RadiantLeader.co members, who can RSVP here. 💛 In Practice: Meaningful MeasurementA few questions to help us assess our results (in our projects, our teams, our leadership) using multiple ways of knowing: 📊 What does the data say? Honor your numbers. They're not falsehoods, just incomplete truths. What quantitative evidence do you have? What are your metrics telling you? Don't dismiss this—just don't stop here. 🫀What's the felt sense? When you walk into the office, the client call, the board meeting, what do you notice in your body? What does your nervous system know about the health of your organizational system? Your somatic awareness recognizes shifts before your spreadsheet does. 🔄 What patterns are you noticing? What keeps showing up in conversations? In behaviors? In the kinds of challenges people bring to you? What tensions emerge again and again? Patterns are data, even when they're not on a dashboard. 👍 What are people choosing? Where are they investing their attention, their energy, their discretionary effort? What are they opting into, and what are they quietly avoiding? 💡What's becoming possible that wasn't before? Are there conversations happening now that couldn't have happened six months ago? Collaborations forming across old divides? Risks people are willing to take? ☯️ Where do different forms of evidence confirm or challenge each other? When your quantitative and qualitative data align, you can have higher confidence. When they diverge, you've found something important to investigate. The contradiction itself is information. Not either/or, but both/and. This isn't guesswork. It’s pattern recognition across multiple data points—the kind of rigorous quantitative and qualitative assessment that anthropologists and organizational ethnographers use every day. It’s triangulating experiential, behavioral, systemic and narrative evidence, leveraging the full range of our human knowing to recognize what’s really happening in a complex system. That's how we assess a mess. Help me assess my own mess 😉As I'm planning this newsletter's next iteration for January 2026, I need your insights to guide its format and focus. Answer these 5 quick questions by November 7th and receive a free registration link for our November 14th Mini-Retreat.
I'd love to hear how these monthly reflections connect with your experience of living and leading in these transformational times. Thank you in advance! 🙏 Onward together. Kristen Lisanti |
Radiant Change
Monthly provocations and practices for transformational leaders. Disrupt the reactive cycle keeping you and your team stuck in the status quo to create real and sustainable change.
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What does it mean to be creative? My mind (perhaps like yours?) conjures artists, writers and makers of things. It is also quick (perhaps like yours?) to inform me that this is something other people do—that I myself am not a creative person. Fortunately, I’ve learned not to listen to my mind all the time. But because this notion of creativity being exclusive to a talented few is so persistent in my brain, I suspect it’s rattling around other brains too. So let’s talk about the kind of...