November 3, 2025
Taking strategic decisions based on financial metrics, OKRs and KPIs feels like steering an organization by looking through the rear view mirror. So which metrics help you make future changes based on the present rather than the past?
One answer comes from Andreas Cleve, CEO of Corti (a healthcare AI infrastructure company) who champions what he calls “stranger metrics.” Cleve argues that “in the age of AI, we need to stop thinking of management as a fixed [HBS professor] Michael Porter type of problem. We need to ensure that everybody in the company is moving fast with a focus on innovation.” As a proxy for innovation, Cleve focuses on the pace of dialogue—both internally and with customers.
Corti achieves this by analyzing communication patterns using Slack. Independently, they’ve developed an approach that delivers basic versions of the type of growth insights our company provides to other clients. This has allowed Corti to understand the internal informal dynamics hidden beneath formal networks.
Corti monitors the quantity of messages, including customer channels, to identify where silos are forming and where communication is slowing—which may signal disengagement from customers and staff. They track whether the right people are talking to each other and ensure conversations stay horizontal rather than being bottlenecked by unnecessary hierarchy.
This approach is vital for maintaining momentum and aligns with Corti’s eight-week theme cycles, which cascade down the organization and break into smaller sub-goals.
For Cleve, monitoring communication reveals whether “our customer got to success without us.” He acknowledges this can be complicated since he doesn’t examine message content, but through weekly and monthly communication analysis meetings, he gains a much better forward-looking measure than relying solely on traditional metrics.
Cleve credits this real-time understanding of Corti’s business reality with enabling more effective strategic decisions. Corti, which has raised 100 million euros in funding, has a vision to make healthcare more widely available. After Covid, communication metrics and customer conversations revealed that application support was disjointed and wasn’t Corti’s strength.
When partners began requesting access to their infrastructure, Cleve wanted to pivot strategically to provide AI infrastructure for healthcare applications—prompting some uncomfortable conversations with investors. However, partly due to their stranger metrics, Cleve could provide evidence to persuade investors of the pivot’s value.
Yet focusing heavily on day-to-day metrics risks losing sight of long-term values and culture. For listed companies especially, fighting short-termism proves difficult. Investors crave certainty, and the easiest way to provide it is by shortening timescales. Near-term events can be predicted with greater certainty than distant ones. While sophisticated investors should be able to handle uncertainty, as I mentioned in a recent post, humans inherently seek certainty.
This is demonstrated by the Ellsberg Paradox, which shows people consistently prefer known probabilities—even poor ones—over unknown probabilities. Research confirms that participants chose a guaranteed five dollars over a lottery guaranteed to deliver at least five dollars or more. Our aversion to ambiguity leads us to pick known poor options.
Cleve mitigates the risk of losing sight of long-term goals and culture through monthly informal board meetings and quarterly formal board meetings, from which the eight-week themes emerge. However, as I discussed with Vidya Peters last month, vision requires constant reinforcement, and eight-week cycles could divert less strategically minded employees from maintaining long-term vision and culture.
Monitoring communication flows offers organizations an important way to measure progress. While financial metrics remain essential, they cannot capture the real-time dynamics driving innovation, employee productivity and customer success. By embracing stranger metrics alongside traditional measures, companies can balance immediate insights with long-term vision.
The challenge isn’t choosing between forward-looking and backward-looking metrics, but creating a framework where both inform strategic decisions. As AI continues reshaping business operations, understanding and optimizing human communication patterns may become the most critical competitive advantage of all.
