The Tyranny Of Metrics Quotes

The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.

Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data.

In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signaling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicizing the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.

just as Soviet managers responded by producing shoddy goods that met the numerical targets set by their overlords, so do schools, police forces, and businesses find ways of fulfilling quotas with shoddy goods of their own:

Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one’s actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts.

There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge—knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.

Metric fixation is the persistence of these beliefs despite their unintended negative consequences when they are put into practice.6 It occurs because not everything that is important is measureable, and much that is measurable is unimportant.

Trying to force people to conform their work to preestablished numerical goals tends to stifle innovation and creativity—valuable qualities in most settings. And it almost inevitably leads to a valuation of short-term goals over long-term purposes.

If what is actually measured is a reasonable proxy for what is intended to be measured, and if it is combined with judgment, then measurement can help practitioners to assess their own performance, both for individuals and for organizations. But problems arise when such measures become the criteria used to reward and punish—when metrics become the basis of pay-for-performance or ratings.

It occurred to me that we now as a culture, as a people have legitimately become the progeny of the Digital Age. Ostensibly, we subsist within a dehumanized frontier--a computational, compartmentalized, mathematized collectivist-grid. Metrics have prohibitively supplanted ethics. Alternately, the authentic aesthetic experience has been sacrificed and transposed by the new breed of evangelicals: the purveyors of the advertising industry. Thus the symbolic euphoria induced by the infomercial is celebrated as the new Delphic Oracle. Alas, we've transitioned from a carbon-based life form into an information-based, bio-mechanical, heuristically deprived and depleted entity best described as "a self-balancing 28-jointed adaptor-based biped, an electro-chemical reduction plant integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts." Consequently, we exist under the tyranny of hyper-specialization, which dislodges and disposes our sense of logic, proportion and humanity from both our cognitive and synaptic ballet.

In the end, there is no silver bullet, no substitute for actually knowing one's subject and one's organization, which is partly a matter of experience and partly a matter of unquantifiable skill. Many matters of importance are too subject to judgement and interpretation to be solved by standardized metrics. Ultimately, the issue is not one of metrics versus judgment, but metrics as informing judgement, which includes knowing how much weight to give to metrics, recognizing their characteristic distortions, and appreciating what can't be measured. In recent decades, too many politicians, business leaders, policymakers, and academic officials have lost sight of that.

To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it, is to be blind and to mislead others," as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgement. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgement applies more broadly: judgement is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, "a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together." A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.

Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10

Enterprising government employees become consultants.

Gaming through creaming. This takes place when practitioners find simpler targets or prefer clients with less challenging circumstances, making it easier to reach the metric goal, but excluding cases where success is more difficult to achieve.

Improving numbers by lowering standards. One way of improving metric scores is by lowering the criteria for scoring. Thus, for example, graduation rates of high schools and colleges can be increased by lowering the standards for passing. Or airlines improve their on-time performance by increasing the scheduled flying time of their flights.

Since many impoverished students would inevitably be absent when the annual test was administered, or would fail the test itself, he predicted that the net effect of the proposed reform would be to reduce the funding of schools for the poor.

students ingested mountains of facts and arithmetic, but were bereft of analytic ability and utterly incapable of understanding sophisticated prose or poetry. They were taught not to reason but to cram.

a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happen to be nonmeasurable.”24 The various armed forces sought to maximize measurable “production”: the air force through the number of bombing sorties; artillery through the number of shells fired; infantry through body counts, reflecting statistical indices devised by McNamara and his associates in the Pentagon. But, as Luttwak writes, “In frontless war where there are no clear lines on the map to show victory and defeat, the only true measure of progress must be political and nonquantifiable: the impact on the enemy’s will to continue to fight.

The quest for numerical metrics of accountability is particularly attractive in cultures marked by low social trust. And mistrust of authority has been a leitmotif of American culture since the 1960s. Thus in politics, administration, and many other fields, numbers are valued precisely because they replace reliance on the subjective, experience-based judgments of those in power. The quest for metrics of accountability exerts its spell over those on both the political left and right. There is a close affinity between it and the populist, egalitarian suspicion of authority based on class, expertise, and background.

The suspicion of authority was intrinsic to the post-1960s political left: to rely upon the judgment of experts was to surrender to the prejudices of established elites. Thus, the left had its reasons for advancing an agenda that professed to make institutions accountable and transparent, using the purportedly objective and scientific standards of measured performance.

On the right there was the suspicion, sometimes well founded, that public-sector institutions were being run more for the benefit of their employees than their clients and constituents. In some schools, police departments, and other government agencies, time-serving was indeed a reality, even if not as predominant or universal as its critics alleged. The culture of metric accountability was an understandable attempt to break the stranglehold of entrenched gerontocracy. When institutional establishments came under populist attack, they too resorted to metrics as a means of defense to demonstrate their effectiveness.

To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it is to be blind and to mislead others,” as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgment. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgment applies more broadly: judgment is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, “a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together.”7 A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.

Rankings create incentives for universities to become more like what the rankings measure. What gets measured is what gets attention. That leads to homogenization as they abandon their distinctive missions and become more like their competitors.

The hazard of metrics so purely focused on monetary return on investment is that like so many metrics, they influence behavior. Already, universities at the very top of the rankings send a huge portion of their graduates into investment banking, consulting, and high-end law firms—all highly lucrative pursuits.48 These are honorable professions, but is it really in the best interests of the nation to encourage the best and the brightest to choose these careers?

Pronovost himself accounts for its success by the fact that the project worked through clinical communities, working toward common professional goals and treating central line–induced infections as a solvable social problem.

Our new care pathways were effective because they were led by physicians, enabled by real-time data-based feedback, and primarily focused on improving the quality of patient care,” which “fundamentally motivated our physicians to change their behavior.” Crucial too was the fact that “the men and women who actually work in the service lines themselves chose which care processes to change. Involving them directly in decision making secured their buy-in and made success more likely.” What we can learn from the Geisinger example is the importance of having providers develop and monitor performance measures. The fact that the measures were in keeping with their own professional sense of mission was crucial.

idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong…. The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.

Only when multiple compromises have been made and a deal has been reached can it be subjected to public scrutiny, that is, made transparent.

since if government officials know that all of their ideas and positions may be made public, it inhibits openness, candor, and trust in communications. The predictable result will be for government officials to commit ever less information to writing, either in print or in the form of emails. Instead, they will limit important matters to oral conversation. But that decreases the opportunity to carefully lay out positions.

One result was the publication of the names of confidential informants, including political dissidents, who had spoken with American diplomats in Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world, and elsewhere.6 As a consequence, some of these individuals had to be relocated to protect their lives. More importantly, the revelations made it more difficult for American diplomats to acquire human intelligence in the future, since the confidentiality of conversations could not be relied upon.

For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable.

Goal displacement through diversion of effort to what gets measured. Goal displacement comes in many varieties. When performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a raise, raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people will focus on satisfying those measures—often at the expense of other, more important organizational goals that are not measured.1 Economists Bengt Holmström and Paul Milgrom have described it in more formal terms as a problem of misaligned incentives: workers who are rewarded for the accomplishment of measurable tasks reduce the effort devoted to other tasks.2 The result is that the metric means comes to replace the organizational ends that those means ought to serve.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits. Rule cascades. In an attempt to staunch the flow of faulty metrics through gaming, cheating, and goal diversion, organizations institute a cascade of rules. Complying with them further slows down the institution’s functioning and diminishes its efficiency.

Rewarding luck. Measuring outcomes when the people involved have little control over the results is tantamount to rewarding luck. It means that people are rewarded or penalized for outcomes that are actually independent of their efforts. Those penalized rightly feel that they’ve been treated unfairly.

Discouraging innovation. When people are judged by performance metrics, they are incentivized to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something that is not yet established, indeed hasn’t been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. Trying out something new entails risk, including the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure.6 When performance metrics discourage risk they inadvertently promote stagnation.

Discouraging cooperation and common purpose. Rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes the sense of common purpose as well as the social relationships that provide the unmeasureable motivation for cooperation and institutional effectiveness.7 Reward based on measured performance tends to promote not cooperation but competition. If the individuals or units respond to the incentives created, rather than aiding, assisting, and advising one another, they strive to maximize their own metrics, ignoring, or even sabotaging, their fellows. As Donald Berwick, a leading medical reformer, has recounted, One hospital CEO described to me his system of profit-center management, in which middle management bonuses depended on local budget performance. I asked him if one of his managers would transfer resources from his department to another’s if it would help the organization as a whole. “Yes,” the CEO answered honestly, “if he were crazy.

Degradation of work. Compelling the people in an organization to focus their efforts on the narrow range of what gets measured leads to a degradation of the experience of work. Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10 One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. Teachers move out of public schools to private schools and charter schools. Engineers move out of large corporations to boutique firms. Enterprising government employees become consultants. There is a healthy element in this. But surely the large-scale organizations of our society are the poorer for driving out those most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

Costs to productivity. Economists who specialize in measuring economic productivity report that in recent years the only increase in total factor productivity in the American economy has been in the information-technology-producing industries.11 A question that ought to be asked is to what extent the culture of metrics—with its costs in employee time, morale, and initiative, and its promotion of short-termism—has itself contributed to economic stagnation?

But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits.

And, as recounted in the book Moneyball, statistical analysis can sometimes discover that clearly measureable but neglected characteristics are more significant than is recognized by intuitive understanding based on accumulated experience.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”7) Most organizations have multiple purposes, and that which is measured and rewarded tends to become the focus of attention, at the expense of other essential goals. Similarly, many jobs have multiple facets, and measuring only a few aspects creates incentives to neglect the rest.

Any measure used for control is unreliable.”10 To put it another way, anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed.

metric fixation has elements of a cult. Studies that demonstrate its lack of effectiveness are either ignored, or met with the assertion that what is needed is more data and better measurement.

Measuring the most easily measurable. There is a natural human tendency to try to simplify problems by focusing on the most easily measureable elements.1 But what is most easily measured is rarely what is most important, indeed sometimes not important at all. That is the first source of metric dysfunction.

measuring the simple when the desired outcome is complex. Most jobs have multiple responsibilities and most organizations have multiple goals. Focusing measurement on just one responsibility or goal often leads to deceptive results.

So organizations measure what they’ve spent, rather than what they produce, or they measure process rather than product.

Degrading information quality through standardization. Quantification is seductive, because it organizes and simplifies knowledge. It offers numerical information that allows for easy comparison among people and institutions.2 But that simplification may lead to distortion, since making things comparable often means that they are stripped of their context, history, and meaning.3 The result is that the information appears more certain and authoritative than is actually the case: the caveats, the ambiguities, and uncertainties are peeled away,

the decline of trust leads to a new mindset in which “[a]voiding human choice in public decisions is not just a theory … but a kind of theology…. Human choice is considered too dangerous.” As a consequence, “Officials no longer are allowed to act on their best judgment”4 or to exercise discretion, which is judgment about what the particular situation requires.5 The result is overregulation: an ever tighter web of rules, including the proliferation of rules within organizations.

Often, indeed, individuals are most capable of deciding on the best provider of services. But not always, and in some domains choice is particularly fraught. In healthcare, for example, choices pertaining to physicians or hospitals are made either when patients are healthy and disinclined to bother with medical matters, or when they are sick and therefore more anxious about their decisions, which diminishes their ability to process complex and often conflicting metrics.

The problem is that management’s quest to get a handle on a complex organization often leads to what Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman have dubbed “complicatedness”: the expansion of procedures for reporting and decision-making, requiring ever more coordination bodies, meetings, and report-writing. With all that time spent reporting, meeting, and coordinating, there is little time left for actual doing.13 This drain on time and effort is exacerbated by the tendency of executives under the spell of metric fixation to distrust the experienced judgment of those under them.

Thus, there is a gap between the measureable contribution and the actual, total contribution of the agent. As a result, measured performance (such as an increase in the division’s profits or a rise in the company’s stock price) may actually lead to the organization getting less of what it really needs from its employees. Moreover, there was an inevitable distortion of incentives created by the quest for simple, quantifiable standards by which to measure and reward performance

They have all distinguished between two forms of knowledge, one abstract and formulaic, the other more practical and tacit. Practical or tacit knowledge is the product of experience: it can be learned, but cannot be conveyed in general formulas. Abstract knowledge, by contrast, is a matter of technique, which, it is assumed, can be easily systematized, conveyed, and applied.

But his own interpretation is that the improvement in medical outcomes was brought about primarily by “a shift in clinicians’ belief—by showing them that the rate of infection was not inevitable and could be controlled, in a way that appealed to their professional ethos as doctors and nurses.

Promoting short-termism. Measured performance encourages what Robert K. Merton called “the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences.”3 In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations.

Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.

So much advice around innovation and creativity amounts to more: more methods, more habits, more techniques. If we don’t simultaneously carve away less important uses of our time to create space for reflection and contemplation—distance from the problem at hand—we only undermine the effort to boost ideaflow. Caught up in the day-to-day, our imaginations become blocked, just as David Ogilvy warned at the top of this chapter. To escape “the tyranny of reason,” we must be as tactical about withdrawing from a losing battle as we are about gathering divergent inputs or vigorously testing our ideas. The “Father of Advertising” was an ace at the mental game of creative output. He intuitively understood that generating more ideas required doing a little less.

The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. —DAVID OGILVY

What has come to be called “Campbell’s Law,” named for the American social psychologist Donald T. Campbell, holds that “[t]he more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

In the case a bricklayer working for a subcontractor on the Perth Stadium construction project suffered serious injuries when he single-handedly began to remove two overhead steel purlins that were in the way when he was building a wall. One of the discussions in the case was the extent to which the principal should have provided training to the subcontractor about workplace health and safety hazards associated with the work. In that context, the court observed: Pursuant to its contract, NeoWest had autonomy in how it was to complete the works and it was the appropriate body to provide the training and induction within its specialised area and to specify the methods to be used in performing the tasks required of its workers. It would not have been reasonably practicable, or indeed wise, for the first defendant to impinge on NeoWest's training and induction of its own employees as to the proper and safe method of completing the works within its scope of works and area of expertise and specialised knowledge, possibly to override or even contradict that training and induction. Each individual trade's expertise and specialist knowledge was the very reason why the first defendant engaged subcontractors to perform the various works in the first place, rather than complete them itself.60 This limited (although still very onerous) obligation is consistent with a social approach to managing wicked problems. As I argue later in the book, you cannot solve wicked problems – we cannot solve safety. All we can do is “tame” the problem of safety – do the best we can.

Nor, according to the Dutch experts, did the publication of metrics affect patient behavior in choosing a provider or hospital. Their conclusion: “The small body of evidence available provides no consistent evidence that the public release of performance data changes consumer behavior or improves care.

The phenomenon of risk-aversion means that some patients whose lives might be saved by a risky operation are simply never operated upon. But there is also the reverse problem, that of overly aggressive care to meet metric targets. Patients whose operations are not successful may be kept alive for the requisite thirty days to improve their hospital’s mortality data, a prolongation that is both costly and inhumane.

Berwick captured this brilliantly in his article, “The Toxicity of Pay for Performance”: “Pay for performance” reduces intrinsic motivation. Many tasks, especially in health care, are potentially intrinsically satisfying. Relieving pain, answering questions, exercising manual dexterity, being confided in, working on a professional team, solving puzzles, and experiencing the role of a trusted authority—these are not at all bad ways to spend part of one’s day at work. Pride and joy in the work of caring is among the many motivations that do result in “performance” among health care professionals. In the rancorous debates about compensation, fees, and reimbursement that so occupy the time of health care leaders and clinicians today, it is all too easy to neglect, or even to doubt, the fact that nonfinancial and intrinsic rewards are important in the work of medical care. Unfortunately, neglecting intrinsic satisfiers in work can inadvertently diminish them.

serious crimes such as robbery were downgraded to “theft snatch,” and rapes were often underreported so as to hit performance targets. As a retired detective chief superintendent put it, “When targets are set by offices such as the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, what they think they are asking for are 20% fewer victims. That translates into ‘record 20% fewer crimes’ as far as … senior officers are concerned.

we try to develop performance metrics for any complex environment or organization that is either unique or substantially different from other environments or organizations, standardized measures of performance will be inaccurate and deceptive. Yet the desire to create performance metrics that are “transparent” in the interests of “accountability” usually translates into using metrics that are standardized and centralized, since such metrics are more easily grasped by superiors and by publics far from the field of operations

observations that are communicated through quantitative measures are regarded as “empirical,” while observations conveyed in qualitative form are treated as less reliable, despite the fact that “in practice, many of the quantitative metrics used in assessments are themselves anecdotal in that they reflect the observational bias of those reporting.

The cases of Mylan and Wells Fargo are recent examples of an older and common pattern, by which policies of payment for measured performance lead employees to engage in actions that create long-run damage to a firm’s reputation.

A focus on measurable performance indicators can lead managers to neglect tasks for which no clear measures of performance are available, as the organizational scholars Nelson Repenning and Rebecca Henderson have recently noted.25 Unable to count intangible assets such as reputation, employee satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, trust, and cooperation, those enamored of performance metrics squeeze assets in the short term at the expense of long-term consequences. For all these reasons, reliance upon measurable metrics is conducive to short-termism, a besetting malady of contemporary American corporations.

Performance metrics as a measure of accountability help to allocate blame when things go badly, but do little to encourage success,28 especially when success requires imagination, innovation, and risk. Indeed, as the economist Frank Knight noted almost a century ago, entrepreneurship entails “immeasurable uncertainty,” which is not susceptible to metric calculation.

Costs in employee time. To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics—not to speak of the time required to actually read them. That is exacerbated by the “reporting imperative”—the perceived need to constantly generate information, even when nothing significant is going on. Sometimes the metric of success is the number and size of the reports generated, as if nothing is accomplished unless it is extensively documented. Those within the organization end up spending more and more time compiling data, writing reports, and attending meetings at which the data and reports are coordinated. So, as the heterodox management consultants Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman note, employees work longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organization, while sapping their enthusiasm.

1.  What kind of information are you thinking of measuring? The more the object to be measured resembles inanimate matter, the more likely it is to be measureable: that is why measurement is indispensable in the natural sciences and in engineering. When the objects to be measured are influenced by the process of measurement, measurement becomes less reliable. Measurement becomes much less reliable the more its object is human activity, since the objects—people—are self-conscious, and are capable of reacting to the process of being measured. And if rewards and punishments are involved, they are more likely to react in a way that skews the measurement’s validity. By contrast, the more they agree with the goals of those rewards, the more likely they are to react in a way that enhances the measurement’s validity.

2.  How useful is the information? Always begin by reminding yourself that the fact that some activity is measureable does not make it worth measuring, indeed, the ease of measuring may be inversely proportional to the significance of what is measured. To put it another way, ask yourself, is what you are measuring a proxy for what you really want to know? If the information is not very useful or not a good proxy for what you’re really aiming at, you’re probably better off not measuring it.

3.  How useful are more metrics? Remember that measured performance, when useful, is more effective in identifying outliers, especially poor performers or true misconduct. It is likely to be less useful in distinguishing between those in the middle or near the top of the ladder of performance. Plus, the more you measure, the greater the likelihood that the marginal costs of measuring will exceed the benefits. So, the fact that metrics is helpful doesn’t mean that more metrics is more helpful.

Metric fixation, which aspires to imitate science, too often resembles faith.

If what is actually measured is a reasonable proxy for what is intended to be measured, and if it is combined with judgment, then measurement can help practitioners to assess their own performance, both for individuals and for organizations.

But in many cases, the extension of standardized measurement may be of diminishing utility, or even counterproductive—sliding from sensible solutions to metric madness.

When proponents of metrics advocate “accountability,” they tacitly combine two meanings of the word. On the one hand, to be accountable means to be responsible. But it can also mean “capable of being counted.” Advocates of “accountability” typically assume that only by counting can institutions be truly responsible. Performance is therefore equated with what can be reduced to standardized measurements. When proponents of metrics demand “transparency” they often insinuate that probity requires making explicit and visible as much information as possible. The result is the demand for ever more documentation, ever more mission statements, ever more “goal-setting.”5

Most organizations have multiple purposes, and that which is measured and rewarded tends to become the focus of attention, at the expense of other essential goals. Similarly, many jobs have multiple facets, and measuring only a few aspects creates incentives to neglect the rest.8 When organizations committed to metrics wake up to this fact, they typically add more performance measures—which creates a cascade of data, data that becomes ever less useful, while gathering it sucks up more and more time and resources.

(from Acknowledgments) For some years I have profited from an in-house, informal but ongoing seminar on organizational behavior, a seminar comprising my wife, our three children, and three children-in-law. They have shared their insights into the functions and dysfunctions of the organizational settings in which they have worked, which include government, education, and medicine. I am indebted to all of them, though none are responsible for the uses to which I have put their observations. Eli Muller first drew my attention to the larger themes of The Wire (episodes of which he can quote chapter and verse), and his acute analysis of institutional dynamics finds its echoes in the pages of this book, which he also helped to edit. Thanks go to Joseph Muller, M.D., for orienting me in the literature of medicine and healthcare, as well as his sage advice about the tone and direction of the book. My wife, Sharon, was the first reader and editor of every chapter, and many of the book's ideas were born or refined in our daily conversations (when we weren't talking about the immeasurable pleasures of grandparenthood--but that's the subject of another book). Completion of this book was eased by the support of my parents. I'm saddened to note that this is the last project that I was able to discuss with mt father, Henry Muller, who passed away when the manuscript was nearing completion: his memory is a blessing. My mother, Bella Muller, remains a vigorous source of wisdom, encouragement, and humor in my life.