"A failure is a system revealing itself.
The most expensive failures are quiet ones: a series of decisions that were defensible in the moment and disastrous in combination. In a metric proposal that will change incentives, nobody wakes up wanting the incident; they wake up wanting the shortcut.
In a metric proposal that will change incentives, the argument will be that you are “unblocking” the team. Unblocking without a guardrail is how you create debt that cannot be paid down quietly. Write it down because otherwise two reasonable engineers will execute two different interpretations, and the system will call it “miscommunication.”
John Gall is a reminder to audit the argument, not the intention. Write the future failure and the rational story that will justify it, then choose one guardrail. Do not hide the cost in prose.