Executive dashboards often fail not because of bad data or poor tooling, but because of hidden measurement traps that distort decision-making. Drawing on real (anonymized) consulting experience and well-established ideas from behavioral economics, systems thinking, and management science, this session explores why technically correct KPIs can still lead organizations in the wrong direction.

Through a series of eye-opening “KPI traps” — such as aggregation illusions, metric surrogation, local optimization, and short-term bias — we will unpack how dashboards shape behavior, incentives, and strategic outcomes, often in unintended ways. The focus is not on Power BI features, but on how dashboards are designed, interpreted, and used at the executive level.

The session offers practical frameworks and design principles to help analytics professionals move from reporting metrics to enabling better decisions.

- Target audience: Power BI developers, BI engineers, analytics consultants, data leads, and professionals involved in designing or consuming executive-level dashboards

- Session focus: Business and decision-making concepts illustrated with Power BI examples (tool-agnostic principles, not a feature walkthrough)

- Level: Intermediate to Advanced (conceptually deep; no advanced DAX or statistics required)

- Format: 50-minute talk followed by 10 minutes of Q&A

- Technical requirements: Standard presentation setup; no live demos required

- Key takeaway: Practical frameworks to identify misleading KPIs and design dashboards that support better decisions, not just accurate reporting