This article examines the high rate of unused and broken dashboards in organizations, highlighting how they often fail to provide lasting value. It discusses the disconnect between dashboard creation and actual usage, driven by shifting priorities and limited attention spans within teams. The piece also touches on the implications of this phenomenon for organizational behavior and project management.

• About half of an org's dashboards audited turned out to be broken or ignored, raising the question of why they were built at all.
• Dashboards act as "grave markers" for past priorities—built for a moment of attention that fades as new projects compete for focus.
• Letting teams self-manage their own dashboards helped somewhat, but didn't solve the core problem since attention still shifts away as new initiatives emerge.
• Organizational attention is a genuinely limited resource (with academic grounding), so strategic planning that overcommits people guarantees old dashboards get abandoned.