I was talking with one of my staff about some service design issues yesterday. The point that was brought up was about how some action around poor service is coming from a need to present numbers and I brought up the concept of GoodHart’s Law.
If you’ve never heard GoodHart’s Law it goes like this “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This has show to be true many times over. So if you’re dealing with a problem in your culture, service delivery, etc. Look at the incentives you’ve put in place by what your team believes to be the target.
Often i’ve found the better version is to have a less numerically clear ideal state as a target and the metrics inform if your distance to the ideal state.
E.G. “We never want a client to get off the phone and feel like their problem will never be solved. We want them to get off the phone with us and think ‘they have this.'”
Then you add metrics, not as goals, but as informers of the distance between where you are and the ideal future state.
Thoughts? Have you seen this in your own org?
Thoughts on Data, Culture, and Organizational Development
