Counterintuitively, sometimes—especially in creative problem-solving endeavors—modeling the messiness of reality requires being imprecise or approximate. Imprecise wiggle room often better reflects what’s truly happening than basing conclusions on a precise but false premise.

The image presented here shows how this idea can be applied to understanding the progress of a project using the Move the Needle feature in Basecamp.

But we can apply this logic to almost anything where human systems and innovation are central to the activity.

2. Metrics do not lie by being wrong about the thing they are measuring, they lie by being wrong about how important something is and how unimportant all the things you can't measure are.