[jlawson]

The managers are pursuing legibility.

There's a great book about this called Seeing Like a State. It's about the conflict between top-down planning and bottom-up development of complex systems - things like cities and forests.

One of the big points is that leaders tend to be obsessed with making the system legible to themselves, often at great cost to the effectiveness of the system itself. There's a sense that "if I can't easily model/perceive it in my head, it doesn't exist or it's worthless". Of course the reality is that the majority of what goes on in a complex system is invisible to any outsider; the system is more complex than the brain trying to model it. So management efforts that ignore or even try to reduce that illegible complexity end up destroying much of the system they're attempting to manage.

I think there's also a simpler explanation: It's unintentional gamification. People like dopamine hits they get from rising numbers, rectilinear grids, clean charts and projections. So they pursue these things as an end goal, imagining somehow that this is the same as pursuing success. Of course a really well-working complex system (like a company or city or forest) is too complex to model with such tools. But the manager isn't playing to make a good complex system, he's playing a little game of graphs on his computer screen. The chart went up and to the right - you win today!