I sat with a client last month who swore her team hated their scoreboard. “It feels like the Panopticon,” she said.
I asked her one question: “Who updates it?”
“They do. Nobody makes them.”
Bentham’s prison worked because you never knew if you were being watched. That’s the whole design. A scoreboard has no hidden tower. Everyone sees everything, all the time, which makes it the opposite of a panopticon, not a version of one. What she was describing wasn’t surveillance. It was a team that got tired of being asked things they already knew the answer to. They got tired of sitting in the same meeting week after week, rehashing what was discussed in the last few meetings with no progress. They were frustrated with chasing moving targets and priorities.
I’ve watched this pattern for years now, across scoreboard and tracker implementations, across clients who resisted the tool right up until the week they stopped needing to send a Monday status email. The resistance is never really about the tracker. It’s about what it exposes: how much energy everyone had been spending managing the appearance of progress instead of the progress itself.
So I ask my clients this, and I’ll ask you:
- Who wants to forget something and spend the next week catching up?
- Who wants a reminder because no one trusts them to hold it themselves?
- Who loves the ever-changing priorities?
- Who loves being asked “where’s that at?” when the answer is sitting right there?
- Who wants to chase down a number that should already be visible?
- Who wants to ask what’s next instead of just looking?
- Who wants to walk into a meeting having lost the thread of the last one?
Nobody I’ve ever coached. Not once.
That’s the part people miss. This was never about tracking. It’s about giving people back the hours they used to spend proving they were on track instead of just being on track.
Where is your team still spending energy proving instead of doing?
