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@sj_zero >you can have a value that's important and measured and controlled, people will find ways to make sure the number looks better, even at the cost of not actually improving the actual metric.
Playing the scorecard. Look at who makes it into elite institutions, especially government: people who play the scorecard. They "have" approved opinions, values, and beliefs. They did well in school because, yeah they're smarter than average (I'm not trying to undermine them on this), but they're NOT the smartest and most capable people. We have a bureaucrat class that's really good at manipulating things to show the results they know they're supposed to get, and it shows in the 'quality' of work.
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That's a really insightful thing to say. Makes sense given my personal experience of bureaucracies.
And we have many bureaucrats as leaders, but leaders need not be bureaucrats and outside of a very small number of situations you probably don't want them to be either because just as you say, they're busy trying to get the results they know they're supposed to get and show the people who need to see it that they got that result. Contrast another kind of leader which may have a plan or a vision to go beyond benchmarks, or yet another kind of leader who can help get the best out of their people in ways you might not be able to measure using a microcaliper.
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@sj_zero The business world has been plagued by this for at least 20 years (thank you MBA-mills). I remember when a company I worked for switched from a P&L to KPI metrics for their divisions. Suddenly the teams who were the most well-rounded struggled to hit goals and the score card players got the chance to look better than they deserved. That last for about two years until they pushed out a lot of talent who suddenly wasn't getting bonuses despite skill and tenure, and they rolled to using a hybrid system. My anecdotal observation was that women performed better in KPI land, but the net performance was lower across the company and the morale had tanked. You have to have accurate data to properly use KPIs, so now we can add a whole new cost in the form extremely expensive "data scientists" 😔 to help the business operate almost as well as it did when they simply focused on profitability and let managers finetune as needed.
Having been on both sides of this and done PM work, I find scorecards to be useful for pacing and planning, but it's the difference between strategy and tactics. You need a plan and goals, you need to be able to measure its success or failure, and you need to be willing to pivot to account for unknowns and not base your data on easily cheated metrics. Same goes for "politics".
BowserNoodle ☦️
sj_zero
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