Metric
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The JC sounds off on Management
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When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. ... Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but their aims.
- — G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The stock-in-trade of a middle manager and the management consultant she aspires to become.
Like a key performance indicator, a second-order derivative of actual performance calculated to allow non-experts to make cavalier management decisions, usually to reduce expenditure on — aka make redundant — the person performing that function.
To be contrasted with the ineffable, inarticulable skills that are provided by a subject matter expert.
Goodhart’s law
An excellent page of resources on Goodhart’s law to be found here.
Regressive
Choosing a measurement that is a single proxy to your goal, when the goal actually has several causal factors behind it.
Knowing that successful basketballers tend to be tall, you might build a basketball team by recruiting tall people. However, they might not possess other factors such as coordination, fitness, quick responses etc..
Extremal
Where a proxy might indicate the goal under normal circumstances, but not in variable contexts.
Sugar consumption helped define our ancient ancestors’ survival however today, with a different context, our excessive sugar consumption is often an indicator of an unhealthy diet.
Causal
Confusing Causation vs Correlation when selecting measurements.
Data might indicate increasing ice cream sales when people wear sunglasses. However, providing more sunglasses won’t necessarily boost ice cream sales because they are both caused by a third factor, ie. sunny, hot days.
Adversarial (Cobra Effect)
Choosing a proxy measurement incentivises people to make the proxy the new goal.