#system #systemic-failure #system-design #unintended-consequence
idea
Applying pressure on a metric is making the metric less relevant.
People pressured on a metric will game the system and artificially impact it for their short-term benefit, and so the metric will become meaningless. Or the pressure put on the metric will yield positive short-term results, but alter the longer term. Or the positive impact on the metric being pressured might result in a negative impact on another non-pressured metric.
Examples:
- looking at the number of lines of code to determine the productivity of a developer will have that developer write as many lines as possible, lowering the quality of code and the long-term maintainability.
- incentivizing (putting pressure) on the short term revenue pushes sales people to act with short term interest in mind, therefore negatively impacting it.
Links
- to some extent the long-term example can be attributed to the tragedy of commons
- this is an example of an unintended consequence of a measurement
reference
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Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Marilyn Strathern:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Hacker's laws is a list of principles for "hackers"
