Most risk and operations leaders can produce a dashboard on demand. With incidents, change requests, meeting counts, turnaround times and SLAs. It all looks reassuringly busy, but it misses the one question that matters: Are we making good decisions, and do they stand up later?
That is where traditional productivity metrics quietly fail. In Risk, Ops and Resilience, progress isn't measured by activity. It's measured by decisions: reached, evidenced and sustained without resurfacing next month.
Activity is easy to count. Resolution is not.
Most firms optimise for what can be tallied:
- Meeting count – how many committees convened
- Items processed – papers reviewed, incidents closed, changes approved
- Turnaround time – how quickly something was acknowledged or "closed"
These are useful, but they tell you nothing about whether:
- the underlying risk actually reduced
- the decision was well-founded and evidenced
- the issue stayed closed rather than returning in a new form
Activity metrics measure motion, not resolution.
Why does this matter more in Risk and Operations?
Risk and Ops sit at the intersection of complexity and accountability:
- Decisions are multi-party and multi-stage. A single approval can span several meetings, documents and interpretations.
- The cost of being wrong is asymmetric. One poorly evidenced approval can create more impact than dozens of fast "closures."
- Regulators care about how you knew what you knew. Under Consumer Duty and DORA, firms must evidence not just decisions, but the information, challenge and rationale behind them, none of which appears in a turnaround statistic.
Three ways traditional KPIs hide the real story
1. High meeting count can signal decision avoidance. Without tracking decisions reached or repeated topics, you cannot distinguish governance from wheel-spinning.
2. Turnaround time rewards speed, not substance. A fast response can still be incomplete, weakly evidenced or destined for rework.
3. Items closed can mask recurring risk. If issues return, the system is measuring closure, not control.
What to measure instead: the integrity of decisions
Better indicators include:
- Decision completion rate - percentage of agenda items that end with a clear decision
- Decision re-open rate - how often decisions return within 1–3 months
- Repeat-topic rate - visibility of recurring risk themes
- Evidence-readiness - how quickly rationale and documents can be surfaced
- Time-to-evidence - the real measure of governance defensibility
The shift from busy to accountable
When leadership focuses on decisions rather than activity, behaviours change. Agendas become decision-led and owners provide rationale, not status with dashboards beginning to reflect control, not motion.
Auriqa helps leaders measure what truly moves performance forward with the clarity, defensibility and durability of their decisions.