Dashboards Don’t Stop Debris

Have you ever stopped to consider where certain words come from?

The other day, while driving, I found myself wondering about the term dashboard. Curiosity led me back to horse-drawn buggies. As horses pulled the carriage, dirt, mud, and small rocks — the “dash” — would kick up toward the passengers. To solve the problem, someone installed a wooden board at the front of the buggy. It was called a dashboard.

It wasn’t decorative.
It wasn’t informational.
It was protective.

Today, our car dashboards serve a different purpose. They display speed, fuel levels, navigation, diagnostics, and media. They tell us how the vehicle is performing.

In business, companies rely on dashboards to monitor operational performance. They track KPIs. They visualize trends. They answer questions like:

“Are we within target?”

But here’s the real question:

Do modern business dashboards stop the debris — or do they simply measure the mess after it hits?

But here’s the deeper issue.

In pharmaceutical manufacturing — and in most batch-based operations — the debris isn’t mud and rocks.

It’s lost batches.
It’s deviation backlog.
It’s delayed disposition.
It’s rework.
It’s underutilized capacity.

In other words, it’s Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ).

And unlike a horse-drawn buggy, most modern organizations don’t install a protective board.

They install a reporting screen.

They measure the debris.

They trend it.

They color-code it.

But measurement is not protection.

A red KPI does not stop structural execution friction.
A trending chart does not prevent recurrence.
A dashboard does not discipline a system.

It simply reports what already happened.

And here is where leadership enters the picture.

A leader’s responsibility is not to admire the dashboard.
It is to ask:

What is causing the debris in the first place?

Where is structural friction embedded in the system?
Where are roles unclear?
Where is process ownership diluted?
Where is decision latency creating compounding cost?

Dashboards create visibility.

Leadership creates intervention.

COPQ accumulates when leaders confuse the two.

If the organization only invests in better dashboards, it becomes exceptionally good at describing its instability.

But if it invests in structural correction, the debris slows down — and sometimes stops entirely.

The original dashboard did not measure the mess.
It prevented it.

That is a lesson modern operators cannot afford to ignore.