Endless Debate Over “Is This Serious?”

Is this change serious enough to act on? When the same chart can justify both “do it now” and “let’s wait and see,” the real issue is not the data — it is where the line is drawn.

How this shows up in your dashboards

You might notice patterns like these:

• The chart turns red and some people want to act immediately, others say it is normal fluctuation.
• Meetings spend more time debating whether the situation is “serious” than deciding what to do.
• Different leaders use different informal rules of thumb for when to intervene.
• After a problem escalates, people say the warning “was there,” but no one felt responsible to act.

The discussion isn’t really about the data. It is about where to draw the threshold.

Why every signal turns into a negotiation

Many dashboards highlight changes with color, icons, or alerts, but do not explain what those changes mean for action. “Red” can mean “slightly worse than usual” or “we are in serious trouble” depending on who is looking.

When thresholds are implicit, people import their own comfort levels and risk preferences. The same data supports both urgency and delay, so decisions drift into debate instead of moving forward.

The structural issue underneath

This symptom usually signals missing or unclear Decision Thresholds:

• No explicit boundary between normal variation and “we must respond.”
• Different KPIs use different, undocumented rules for what counts as “off.”
• Escalation rules are based on hierarchy or habit, not on agreed lines in the data.

In the Decision-Ready Dashboard framework, this is a breakdown in Thresholds for Action: dashboards surface movements, but they do not say when the movement crosses a shared line.

When thresholds are not explicit, every change is up for negotiation. The goal is not louder alerts, but clear Decision Thresholds that make “Is this serious?” a design decision, not a recurring argument.