Within small groups, an intuitive sense of trust can easily develop over time.

Within small groups, everyone can see a lot of the nuance and indirect effects of each others' actions up close and over time.

But in larger organizations, it's not possible for everyone to have that level of direct awareness of the nuance in every case.

A leader of a 1000 person org fundamentally can't know the hopes and dreams of every person in their org!

The way to be able to make decisions in those contexts is to create summary statistics, to deliberately do dimensionality reduction to collapse complexity.

This collapse is necessary, otherwise you would be frozen in place with no clarity on what to do.

Hopefully the summary statistics capture the core reality in a directionally useful way, but they can fundamentally never be a full-fidelity version.

This difference between the rich nuanced reality and the summary statistics view is what creates the space that the emergent force known as Goodhart's law will inexorably fill.

It's not possible to navigate the whole territory without a map. But never forget that the map is not the territory.