Look at any program dashboard and you find a column of greens, with the occasional brave amber. Ask one question (green against what?) and the answers thin out fast. The color was a judgment, sometimes a hope, occasionally the result of a negotiation about who wanted to leave the meeting first.
A color is a claim
Every RAG status asserts: this is on track. On track implies a track: a baseline, a target, a measure that says where you should be by now and where you actually are. Strip those away and green quietly degrades into "the owner is not currently worried." That is not a status. It is a mood wearing the costume of a metric.
Green should be a conclusion you can show your working for. If you cannot name the measure, the baseline, and the target, you have not reported status. You have reported confidence.
No baseline, no rating
You cannot rate progress against a number you never set. This is the discipline most programs skip: baseline first. Agree the measure and the starting point before anyone colors anything in. It feels like bureaucracy at the start of the work, which is exactly when it is cheapest, and exactly when everyone wants to skip it. The bill arrives later, when something green for two quarters turns red and no one can reconstruct what green ever meant.
Traceability survives the meeting
The real value of a traceable KPI is that it outlives the person presenting it. A color defended by charm holds for one meeting. A color traced to a measure holds when the presenter is on leave and someone else has to answer for it. Traceability turns a dashboard from a performance into a record.
A dashboard exists to remove arguments, not to host them. Make every color traceable to a measure, or stop pretending the color means anything.