Most organizations today do not measure reality beyond manufacturing, logistics, and retail operations. Somehow the headquarter escaped accountability all together. There they use them as administrative armor. When executives lack the conviction and incentives to inspect actual work, and middle managers lack the ability to produce it, metrics become the primary tool to simulate momentum. The entire layer of coordinators, managers, directors, and status reporters survives by converting real operational problems into clean, sanitized numbers that fit neatly onto a slide deck.
In many companies, executives and middle management have built entire careers out of confusing the two. Measuring actual progress is dangerous: it requires standing in front of real outcomes and taking ownership of the blast radius when things fail. Measuring motion is safe. You track tickets closed, processes followed, story points burned, and quarterly "initiatives" completed.