Back in 2017 I wrote about Goodhart’s Law, the notion that any measure used as a target, ceases to an effective measure. It stops being effective because those being measured learn to game the system in such a way that the measure is optimized rather than the desired result. The canonical example is standardized testing used to determine teacher compensation or school budgets. School administrators and teachers start teaching to the test making the “measure” effectively useless for its intended purpose.
Page Laubheimer and Kate Moran have a very interesting post about the closely related notion of Campbell’s Law, which says the more important some metric is in making a social decision, the more likely it is to be manipulated. Again, a prime example of this is standardized testing but there are many others that can affect any enterprise.
Most of the post is examples of Campbell’s law in action. Laubheimer and Moran end with a short section on some ways to avoid getting bitten by the law. The post serves as a useful reminder not to focus on some specific metric to gauge how things are going in your operation. If you tell people they need to increase some measure or another, you will get what you asked for but probably not what you wanted.
It’s a good post and well worth a few minutes of your time. It’s really easy to forget the lesson they bring but it’s important not to.