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There’s something fascinating about the concept of breaking the plane in football. This invisible vertical barrier that extends infinitely upward from a painted white line determines whether you’ve scored or not. Officials have to make split-second calls about whether any molecule of the football crossed this imaginary threshold while in a player’s possession. It’s meant to be binary - you either broke the plane or you didn’t. But anyone who’s watched a contested touchdown review knows it’s never that simple.
“When measuring problems becomes more important than solving them, the measurement becomes the problem.”
— Ron Bronson (@ronbronson.com) December 21, 2024 at 9:29 AM
This reminds me of something I’ve been tracking lately - what happens when organizations become obsessed with measurement over mission.
I heard about a perfect example of this recently. A large organization brought in new leadership promising transformation and efficiency. But instead of focusing on the actual work of transformation, they became obsessed with documenting the transformation. Monthly reports about the progress of planning the transformation. Meetings about the meetings about the transformation. Forms to track the completion of other forms. The measurement machinery took over completely.
What’s particularly interesting about these situations is how the infrastructure of measurement creates its own reality. Once you build systems to measure things in certain ways, those measurements start driving behavior rather than the other way around. The organization stops asking fundamental questions about process and progress: Are we breaking down problems into solvable pieces? Are we learning and adapting as we go? Are we bringing stakeholders along with us?
Instead, everything gets reduced to binary outcomes - did we break the plane or not? This obsession with final outcomes over iterative progress is particularly dangerous because it assumes we fully understand the problem from the start and that our reasoning is accurate. But complex organizational challenges rarely work that way. Sometimes you need to move a few yards forward, reassess, maybe change direction entirely based on what you’ve learned.
The real tragedy is how this approach burns trust. When leadership focuses solely on crossing their imaginary lines while ignoring the actual work of incremental progress and stakeholder engagement, they often end up with a technically “complete” transformation that nobody believes in. They may have broken their plane, but they’ve broken their organization in the process.
What’s needed instead is an approach that recognizes complexity and embraces iteration. One that values honest communication about intentions and challenges over artificial certainty. One that understands that sometimes you need to run a few plays, gain some yards1, and maybe even call an audible2 before you’re in position to score. Most importantly, one that brings stakeholders along at every stage - even if the eventual goal isn’t something they’re excited about, they at least understand the reasoning and have been part of the journey.
Between our proclivity for binary thinking and this obsession with final outcomes over iterative progress, we’ve created systems that optimize for all the wrong things. Our measurement machinery has become so complex that it prevents the very solutions it was meant to track. We’re so focused on whether we’ve broken the plane that we’ve forgotten how to actually move the ball down the field3.
The plane isn’t real. It never was. In high school football where there’s no replay, you make a judgement call, in the pros they have video replay. Our decisions in real-time don’t come with a chance to replay to make sure we got it right in the moment. We have to act, reflect and adapt. And until we start building systems that can handle nuance, embrace iteration, and value actual progress over arbitrary thresholds, we’re just going to keep measuring our way into paralysis.1 In American gridiron football, teams have four “downs” or attempts to advance the ball 10 yards. Each successful 10-yard gain earns a “first down” and a fresh set of attempts. This system encourages teams to think strategically about incremental progress rather than trying to score on every play. Teams often take a few plays to test the defense, gain small amounts of yardage, and adjust their strategy based on what works. In the Canadian version of gridiron football, you get three downs
2 An “audible” in football is when the quarterback changes the planned play at the line of scrimmage by literally shouting something out loud, after seeing how the defense is set up to signal to their teammates that we’re changing things in real time. Audibles are practiced; there are a series of pre-practiced plays you generally call on an audible.
3 Moving the ball down the field refers to making steady forward progress in football by gaining yards through a series of plays, rather than focusing solely on scoring.
