I keep trying to tell people that the metrics knife is sharpened on both sides. The only way to be absolutely, categorically sure of your trajectory is if your velocity is 0. And that is, as they say, a "divide by zero error".

These rules and tools go in to fix a hurt caused by making mistakes, and somewhere it gets twisted away from "not making the same dumb mistakes repeatedly" to "never make any mistakes", which slows things down until you eventually make the chiefest of mistakes for a capitalist venture: never shipping.

Two of my better bosses pointed out that only people who risk nothing avoid making mistakes. One of those thought that "perfect estimates" meant you were over as often as you were under (the old accuracy vs precision argument). You can't achieve anything without taking some risks, and 'boring company' only works in a few niche markets, that don't pay well.