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Good decisions often come from reducing complex choices to a single, meaningful variable.

Businesses already use this idea by tracking key metrics, like sales performance, as single numbers.

The same approach works in personal decisions, by finding your own version of "time to sheep."

“Time to sheep” may be the best metric that I’ve heard of for measuring the livability of a city. For a real outdoorsy person, the exact number of minutes it takes from their front door to livestock matters more than square footage, rent, crime rates, or the hundred other variables people look at when choosing a place to live.

If you're the kind of person who's interested in improving your quality of life, you know what’s most important is to know what's important. Because when we can reduce a complex decision to a single, well-constructed variable, we can transform a multi-dimensional puzzle of competing desires into a simple sorting problem. “Time to sheep” as a metric makes it easy to compare options by making the most important trade-offs more explicit, ultimately leading to better decisions.

The rock band Van Halen used a somewhat similar idea while touring in the 1980s. Buried deep in their technical rider was a seemingly absurd requirement: a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed. To the technicians setting up the venue, this must have looked like pure rock-star diva behavior, an eccentric demand from people with too much fame and too little restraint, but we now know that the band didn’t care for the candy.

What they did care about was whether the venue had read the contract closely, and paid attention to every little detail. If the M&M’s were missing or included all colors, it was a reliable signal that far more important instructions about the power, lights, sound, or safety might have been ignored. This small, arbitrary metric acted as a canary in the coal mine for a highly complex system.

In the corporate world, this concept of finding simple-but-important metrics is formalized as the key performance indicator. KPIs are designed to be the kind of high-level signals that are useful when we want to start improving things. They capture complex goals like “market dominance” or “brand health” in a single number.

In practice, the KPIs that businesses use often become less of a North Star and more a source of noise, because organizations tend to keep adding new metrics without retiring ones that are no longer useful. Some of the dashboards I've seen resemble the cockpit of a Boeing 747, tracking everything from net promoter scores to server latency. But when everything is important, then nothing is. Watching out for too many North Stars becomes more of a mindless stargazing activity.

This is the central message of Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results. Keller argues that extraordinary results don't come from balancing multiple priorities, but from identifying the “lead domino,” or what Keller defines as a single metric (or action) that renders other concerns easier to tackle or irrelevant altogether.

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Mark Zuckerberg applied this idea ruthlessly during Facebook’s infancy. While competing social networks at the time may have chased goals such as “revenue” or even “usability,” Facebook focused on a single number: the number of monthly active users. This metric then acted as a quick yes-no filter for ideas, because whenever engineers pitched a new feature—for example, “Should we add adverts to cover our server costs?” or “Could we introduce a feature to ‘poke’ a friend?", the only question they needed to answer was simply: “Does this help us get more active users"

Lining up the dominos

In 1983, physicist Lorne Whitehead discovered that a single domino can knock over another domino fifty percent larger than itself. And if you start with a tiny, two-inch domino and line up a sequence where each is fifty percent larger than the last, a surprising thing happens: the 22nd domino would be large enough to topple the Eiffel Tower.

The problem is that many of us try to reach our goals by knocking down our "Eiffel Tower" on day one, and so we tend to obsess over what’s called a “lag measure.” Like our body weight or our bank account balance, these numbers are outcomes. They are merely the downstream effects of things we actually can control. But you cannot “do” a lag measure. You can only read one when it's already too late. The better approach is to focus on immediate, actionable levers like the number of times we exercise or our daily spending habits.

To create lasting change in your life, the trick is to identify that lead domino, the single habit or metric that, once established, sets off a chain reaction, and let it make other positive behaviors easier or even automatic. In research, this is known as a “keystone habit,” a routine that's powerful enough to reshape other patterns in day-to-day life.

Some habits reliably act as powerful first dominoes for many people. Exercise, for instance, often triggers improvements in sleep as well as in stress and energy management. Another keystone habit is to spend just a few minutes in the morning making a plan for the day, which can dramatically increase follow-through.

Even tiny actions, like making your bed, provide a sense of accomplishment that cascades into other wins. The magic comes from starting small. Like a small domino that can topple another one much larger than itself, your lead habit should be achievable enough to actually be done consistently, yet potent enough to start a chain reaction. Putting on your running shoes, writing for five minutes, or sending that one important email can eventually move mountains.

Is performance measurement and management fit for the future? Steven A. Melnyk, Umit Bititci, Ken Platts. Management Accounting Research Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2014, Pages 173-186 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mar.2013.07.007

Domino chain reaction, Lorne A. Whitehead, Am. J. Phys. 51, 182 (1983) https://doi.org/10.1119/1.13456

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan. (2013) ISBN 978-1885167774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Thing_(book)

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