How the totality of possible choices are sorted into the correct and wrong answer spaces is subjective. Although there are many that will be sorted the same independent of the manager, there are others that will be sorted specifically because of the manager (the subject). One manager will decide one way because of their internal thought processes, and another may decide the opposite. This then means that some (but not all) management choices are in fact subjective.

That's a description of objective. Additionally there is a very simple test for whether your allegedly subjective edge case was objectively right. Did the thing you were trying to do get done? If the answer is no, then it might have been a reasonable strategy, but if there was a different strategy that would have achieved your goals (both stated and unstated) better then it wasn't the most correct strategy.

There are actions that lead to the things you want (whether profit, or a project, or a team that feels fulfilled, a sane and safe working environment, etc) being done, and actions that do not. Sometimes which are which are unknown or even unknowable ahead of time or the only known thing is that attempting to instrument humans and treat them as machines will not work. Sometimes they are very particular to the situation. But once your actions have an explicit goal then strategies for achieving that goal are objective.

> Objective does not reducible to a metric

That’s quite a claim. Can you give me an example of an objective measurement that isn’t a metric?

Whether, after repeated projects, your team has succeeded more often than average at delivering the project with clients that either will return or help generate more clients, and approximately average (or less) resources as input, that the team are content, cohesive, and fulfilled with their work, and possibly that it was profitable. Ie. that the world you are in after having managed is one you like better than the one that you started in (and before you digress by saying that is subjective, the goal can be subjective but strategies for achieving that goal are objective once a goal is selected) or at least better than counterfactual worlds where you managed differently.

None of these things can be reliably turned into a metric that you can measure day by day without one or several highly fallible layers of abstraction. Any model complex enough to capture all the nuances such that you can blindly follow its output can just be called a manager.

So what you are saying is that you can only objectively measure anything after the fact. Making objectivity useless as a team management tool. My point exactly.

Not only that, even if your team was successful in the past, that doesn’t mean that doing what worked in the past will also make your team successful in the future. The context is important. And the context is always different when you start the next project. It might be a different customer, a different problem, a different team (people leaving/joining), a different world (politics/laws) etc.

So what you are left with is your experience, your people skills, and your ability to adapt to new situations. I believe that no “objective” tool will help with that. But I would be happy to be wrong.

So let me ask again: if you know an objective way to improve the likelihood of your team being successful then I would love to hear it. It would be great to have such a tool.

You just described objective tools after straw manning instrumentable problems as the only objective ones.

Your problem is you're conflating 'subjective' with 'not instrumentable'. Your name is subjective. You can be in an empty white room and choose it and it will always be correct. So is your favourite colour, or whether you think titanic was good. You can't have a subjective opinion and be wrong (although you can make an assertion about one and learn later that you were confused or that your opinion changed)

Once again, the strategy for achieving your goals once they are picked is objective. If you sit in an empty white room and decide the correct strategy for your software business to succeed in your goal of having a product used by a million people is to fire all your experienced employees, hire apprentice chefs, and instruct them to spend all of their time writing poems by hand you're almost definitely wrong.

The post hoc knowledge is proof that it's objective, not proof that it's reducible in its entirety to a simplified metric.

Metrics are a tool for dealing with some objective problems, so are "your experience, your people skills, and your ability to adapt to new situations". Measurements can also include having a conversation or reviewing someone's work but not trying to reduce it to a small set of numbers.

You need to make some measurements to know if you're in touch with reality, but throwing out everything except some tiny subset of measurements that fit in a policy doc or a kpi outline is just as stupid as making decisions from your white room with no feedback.