Most teams only remember the baseline when it breaks.

Until then, it’s a background hum — a silent agreement about what “normal” looks like. The baseline is whatever was true last week, plus or minus the usual noise. It’s the ground we walk on without noticing, the quiet constant that lets the work move forward.

Until, suddenly, the question: Is this right?

This is the klaxon^[1]. The question no one wants to answer. It shows up like a ghost — someone shares a chart, stares too long, and something feels off.

The moment that question is asked — Is this right? — and no one can confidently say yes, or explain why not, something’s already been lost. Not just trust in the number, but trust in the system that produced it. The confidence that inputs are flowing, that deviations mean something instead of signaling a quiet decay.

Neglect creeps in slowly. It’s rarely deliberate. Maybe the person who watched the metric left. Maybe the script broke. Maybe the meeting got canceled. Maybe the team got busy chasing goals above the line, forgetting that the line had to be drawn first.

Baseline erosion usually stems from a few culprits:

• No one owns it. Ownership diffused is ownership denied.
• Too many priorities. Urgency beats stability.
• Loss of context. Metrics outlast the stories that generated them.
• Tooling drift. Systems evolve; queries don’t.

But once that Is this right? moment happens, the real work begins again: rebuilding the quiet confidence that the baseline is understood — and will behave, predictably and legibly.

What It Takes

Restoring a baseline is a cultural task, and not a technical one. It’s saying: this thing matters enough to watch all the time.

Some things help:

• Define one indicator per goal. Not five. Not fifty. One.
• Assign ownership. Name a person, not a team.
• Track it simply. A zero-dash, a burn chart, a single number on the wall.
• Create a ritual. Not just alerts, but human review. A weekly check. A monthly audit.
• Interrogate change. Don’t let anomalies fade into the timeline. Ask why they happened. Assign the learning.
• Write it down. Document the metric, its logic, its exceptions, its evolution. Good baselines come with a changelog.

Most importantly: when the trend shifts, someone must have the authority, fluency, and curiosity to say what it means — and what happens next

Building on Bedrock

Good baselines do more than measure. They stabilize. They give shape to uncertainty. They allow for high-trust conversations, where the debate is about the story the number tells, not whether the number can be trusted at all.

You can’t plan, forecast, or commit if the ground is moving beneath you. You can’t improve what you don’t believe in. And you can’t reach tomorrow’s ambition without honoring today’s reality.

Take care of your baselines. They are the quiet infrastructure beneath your work. Ignore them, and they will ask the question you forgot to: Is this right?