When a new dashboard doesn't get used, the usual response is more training. In most cases, that's treating the wrong problem.
It's probably not a training problem
If people were shown how to use a dashboard and still don't open it, the issue usually isn't that they forgot how. It's that the dashboard doesn't answer a question they actually have day to day. No amount of additional training fixes a tool that isn't solving a real, felt problem for the person looking at it.
Ask what action the number is supposed to trigger
Every metric on a dashboard should map to a decision someone can actually make. If a number is interesting but doesn't change what anyone does next, it's not pulling its weight, and its presence is quietly training people to treat the whole dashboard as something to glance at rather than rely on.
Too many metrics is its own kind of failure
A dashboard with fifty data points isn't more useful than one with five, it's just harder to use. People don't abandon dashboards because they're too simple. They abandon them because finding the one number they actually need takes too much digging.
A dashboard people actually open
The dashboards that get used daily tend to share a shape: a handful of numbers that can be scanned in seconds, with a clear path to drill deeper only when something actually needs a closer look. That's a design choice, not a training outcome, and it's usually the real fix when adoption has stalled.
If a dashboard isn't getting used, the fix is rarely another training session. It's usually a rebuild.
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