“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
– William Bruce Cameron
Why do we find numbers so comforting? Perhaps because they give shape to uncertainty. When something is measured, it feels secure and understandable. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski called this the need for “cognitive closure”—the desire for firm answers over ambiguity. In his early research during the 1980s, he showed how people under pressure tend to seize on the first clear explanation that presents itself, even when it oversimplifies reality.
Unfortunately, the things that sustain organizations over time—creativity, trust, collaboration, and innovation—resist quantification. Innovation especially defies measurement; it is unpredictable, non-linear, and often invisible without hindsight. This is partly why “pay for performance” remains so easy to describe in theory yet increasingly fragile in practice. Without meaningful ways to measure the unmeasurable, efforts to link pay to performance drift toward politics and perception, and the same familiar complaints about the annual performance cycle come back each year to haunt us.
Worse still, the times when we most need to remember this—periods of economic uncertainty, rising competition, and growing pressure to innovate—are the moments when leaders most often succumb to cognitive closure. Many were raised in systems built on short-term metrics, quarterly targets, and measurable goals, and those habits are hard to unlearn.
In What Pay Costs, I set out to explore why we cling to these systems, how they shape our understanding of performance, and what it might take to build organizations that value what truly counts—even when it cannot be counted.
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