Ever noticed how a dashboard can look great even when the change isn’t working?
✅ 100% of people completed training
✅ Everyone has logged in
✅ The rollout went “smoothly”
But then you walk the floor… and no one’s using the new system.
We see this story play out across industries, from logistics to finance. The metrics say success, but the people say otherwise.
When the data looks right but feels wrong
Take a recent project we supported in the transport sector.
Their change dashboard was glowing full training completion, high system access rates, and positive feedback forms.
But when we ran our Enable Change review, we found something different.
People were overwhelmed. They’d completed training but couldn’t connect it to how they actually worked. Supervisors were quietly building workaround guides, and frontline staff were reverting to old tools.
The data didn’t lie, it just didn’t tell the whole story.
What the numbers miss
Dashboards measure activity, not understanding.
A login tells you someone showed up. It doesn’t tell you if they felt confident or confused.
It won’t show you if they used it again tomorrow, or quietly went back to the old way.
Change success isn’t about ticking boxes, it’s about seeing the shift in behaviour and confidence that numbers can’t capture.
What we look for instead
We focus on three indicators that show when change is taking hold:
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Confidence — Are people using the new process without second-guessing themselves?
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Capability — Can they apply what they’ve learned in real work situations?
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Connection — Do they understand how this change fits into the bigger picture?
When these three things grow, adoption follows naturally.
A lesson from the industry
Smart Company recently highlighted that many large organisations are chasing digital transformation metrics but overlooking what matters most — the human element.
We’ve seen that first-hand. When companies treat adoption like a compliance exercise, they might hit their numbers, but they lose their people’s trust.
That’s where real leadership steps in to measure what matters, not just what’s easy to report.
The takeaway
You can’t measure change by counting clicks.
Real progress shows up in behaviour, confidence, and connection.
It’s the shift you can feel, not the one you can chart.
Because change doesn’t live in dashboards. It lives in people.
Written by Enable Change Partners: helping organisations understand change through their people, not just their processes.