When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Goodhart’s Law
For leaders in any team or organization, defining (measurable) goals is no easy job. While there are frameworks like SMART criteria to ensure the goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound, it’s still challenging to gain the equilibrium in how things should be measured.
As Goodhart’s Law stated above, any measurement we set for specific goals, it tends to become the target for people to chase after, to optimize for, while ignoring the ultimate business goals.
In a soviet factory, many tiny and useless nails were produced when the measurement was set as number of nails manufactured. Few giant nails were produced when the measurement was set as weight of nail output.
I personally observed many similar instances where people tried to “game the system” for short term gains but lost competitive advantage in the long run
As a student at school, success was measured by grades, thus many students focused so much on memorizing, but ignored learning.
As a mid-level engineer earlier in my career, I was surprised to see talks on “how to game the system” in order to get promoted at one of the FLAG companies. When the number of CLs (code change submissions)…
