The Counterintuitive Steps to High Achievement - How Metric-Tracking Prevents Innovation

In order to make innovative progress in complex problems and achieve universal high achievement, we need to recognize and traverse through counterintuitive stepping stones. Traditional metrics fail to detect these stepping stones because they are not what we would expect. The complexity of the problem lies in not knowing the stepping stones, and if we already knew them, it wouldn't be a problem. To overcome this, we need to proliferate stepping stone candidates and tolerate the risk of some not working out. This is similar to investing in a portfolio of ideas where we cannot predict which ones will pay off. Having an accountability culture that only focuses on metrics prevents the proliferation of stepping stones and stifles innovation.

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