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For days my HeadsUp landing page was broken.
An AI agent broke it and the board I read each day kept counting visitors while each one landed on the broken page.
Developers keep their code on GitLab. In 2017 one of its engineers meant to wipe a spare copy of the database and typed the command on the live one.
About 300 GB was gone.
The team turned to its five backup systems.
None of them worked.
The daily backup crashed each time it ran and sent a warning email. A mail server rejected every one.
The best copy left was a snapshot an engineer made by hand hours earlier.
GitLab lost about 5,000 projects.
GitLab's backups warned the team each day. None of the warnings reached a person.
If something broke in your business today, which metric would tell you?
Warnings are one kind of signal. A body also has a signal that pulls it toward what it needs.
In the 1990s, Richard Palmiter's lab at the University of Washington bred mice that couldn't make dopamine.
Dopamine drives an animal toward a reward.
At first the mice looked healthy. After about 10 days they slowed down and stopped eating.
Food sat in reach. They could still find it and swallow it.
Within weeks, without help, they starved.
A shot of a drug called L-DOPA gave them enough dopamine for about 10 hours. In those hours they ate.
Their bodies needed food the whole time. Without dopamine, nothing told them it was worth eating.
If nobody reads the metric that shows what's working in your business, you can miss it too.
Frank Meeks watched what people ate. He owned dozens of Domino's stores around Washington, DC.
In 1983, late-night orders from the Pentagon jumped. Soon after, the US invaded Grenada.
Meeks took it for a coincidence.
In 1989 the orders jumped again before the US invaded Panama.
On August 1, 1990, he said, the CIA ordered a record 21 pizzas in one night.
The next day Iraq invaded Kuwait.
People order dinner when they work late. They work late when something big is coming.
Meeks had no view inside the Pentagon.
His order count told him something was happening there.
A body runs on signals too. Pain warns it. Hunger and pleasure pull it toward what it needs.
Your metrics are your business's nervous system.
GitLab's warnings never reached a person, so nobody knew the backups failed. The mice lost the signal that says eat and starved beside their food. Meeks read his orders and knew something big was coming.
What metric could you check daily to stay on top of your business?