Imagine a Monthly Business Review of Pearl Harbor.

The presenter walks into the room with a confident smile.

“Overall, a pretty successful month. Our team showed great resilience.”

Ten air-to-air wins. Ten ground-to-air wins. Thousands of servicemen healthy and ready for deployment. A new reef system seeded in the harbor.

Green checkmarks everywhere.

Sounds pretty good.

Then someone asks a dangerous question:

“How does that compare to what actually happened?”

Suddenly, the dashboard doesn’t look quite so impressive.

That is the problem with an MBR designed to report wins.

The problem isn’t that the numbers are necessarily false.

The problem is that the organization has learned how to win the numbers.

Goodhart’s Law on Steroids

Goodhart’s Law says:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Once leadership rewards a metric, people optimize for it.

Utilization goes up. Tickets closed go up.

The dashboard turns green.

But did the business actually improve?

That’s the question that gets lost.

When every MBR needs a success story, teams learn the rules:

Report the wins. Explain the misses.

Eventually, people aren’t optimizing the business.

They’re optimizing the review.

The metric becomes the target, the target drives behavior, and the behavior makes the metric look better.

A good MBR asks more than “What went well?”

It asks:

What got worse? What aren’t we measuring?

Are we measuring activity—or outcomes?

KPIs matter. But without context, a green dashboard can hide a failing system.

The purpose of an MBR isn’t to prove we had a good month.

It’s to determine whether we’re actually moving toward the outcome we want.

If the MBR can’t report failure or challenge the narrative, it isn’t a business review.

It’s performance theater.

The MBR can only report wins—no matter how the ground really looks.

And once the organization learns to play that game, Goodhart’s Law has already won.