Why do metrics that are supposed to help us grow often make us miserable?
This month’s blog theme is how to stay motivated without sabotaging yourself. The goal is to help readers understand why they resist their own goals, how motivation gets tangled up with pressure, and what it looks like to build a life that feels free rather than forced.
Awareness – Resistance – Motivation – Freedom – Alignment for personal growth
This essay may be a little technical, but it relates to moving in the right direction and without self-sabotage.
First noted by Charles Goodhart, a British economist, in 1975, the principle states that social systems will collapse when their participants artificially change their behavior to best meet the parameters used to evaluate them.
This is true in personal growth as well. When you only aim for a self-improvement target, you’ll stop growing and start tricking yourself instead.
It’s easier than you might think to optimize for numbers on your personal tracking while completely annihilating the habit you originally set out to create.
What Goodhart’s Law means
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. So, why does this occur? It is because people learn to game the system, metrics distort actual human behavior, and we get the number instead of the essence of the behavior itself.
We often adapt our behavior when we hit certain scores. At work, for example, people may focus solely on a graded measure and therefore, important but unmeasured tasks get neglected.
People sometimes manipulate systems to make themselves appear successful.
Numbers can replace meaning; a simple score replaces deep quality. Often in the workplace, leaders manage data instead of reality. When this happens, true goals get lost behind artificial targets. Success becomes a fake statistical illusion.
What Is Goodhart’s Law? Balancing Authenticity & Measurement, by The Business of IT Blog
How metrics backfire in real life
When we measure a goal, the metric often becomes the goal itself. This shift destroys the original purpose of our efforts. For example, tracking daily steps shifts focus to numbers. The hyper-focus on numbers replaces genuine health and movement. At which point walking may become a chore, not an enjoyment.
Another example is social media and follower counts. Content creation can seek metric-driven validation. Then, algorithmic pressure replaces true creative expression. Creators start to please crowds instead of exploring. Writing for metrics rewards sheer output volume. Fluff and filler replace meaningful depth, causing quantity to win at the cost of quality.
In the workplace, human minds automatically substitute the actual goal, excellent customer service, for the metric, which is readily measurable: say, calls less than 2 minutes long. Instead of optimizing the objective, people optimize the measure, and the system achieves perfect numbers on paper, at the expense of actual output.
Here are a couple of famous examples
Corporate executives at Wells Fargo pressured retail banking employees to meet aggressive cross-selling goals by opening multiple accounts per customer. To save their jobs and hit quotas, employees opened millions of fraudulent, unauthorized bank accounts for clients, triggering a massive corporate scandal.
When school funding and teacher evaluations are driven solely by students’ test scores, teachers are motivated to teach to the test. They reorient in-class teaching toward test-taking tricks and drills.
It is not surprising that test scores rise even as understanding and thoughtful analytical skills are shrinking.
Why metrics kill intrinsic motivation
The psychology of over-quantification
When the measures are paramount, we shift from authentically engaged to conforming to instructions. The over-justification effect kicks in when we introduce external incentives or hard-wired measures and cause the brain to perceive a treasured activity like work rather than play.
The danger of the Goodhart trap: people begin to focus solely on maximizing the recorded score, teaching to the test, manipulating the dashboard, whatever, and they completely lose touch with the genuine work we’re trying to do. They get stressed and burned out because they’re stripped of the flexibility of self-change, as tracking tools and stringent quotas enforce rigidity.
Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and the Cobra Effect, by Tom Geraghty
Designing healthy metrics
This means choosing metrics that build capability and well-being while avoiding anxiety and stress around artificial targets.
We focus on what we can influence: habits, inputs, and daily actions, and ignore outcomes for now. We are looking for process, not performance.
Develop a mirror versus judgment perspective. Letting data reveal realities and patterns instead of focusing on individual blame or inadequacy. Develop sensitive systems that understand your physical and psychological limitations, life changes, and personal rhythms. Here are some ways we game ourselves.
- “52 books a year.” Why do you end up speed-reading thin paperbacks so you can count another book you didn’t really finish, instead of reading books that might change your life?
- Wearing a fitness watch that tracks your “10,000 steps,” but when you are hurt or have been up all night, it still makes the pursuit of an arbitrary metric more important than rest or rehabilitation. You have lost track of what is important.
- Trying to hit a good sleep score from your sleep tracker breeds orthosomnia, which is the obsession with sleeping well, which ironically ruins the very sleep quality you are measuring.
Walking becomes a chore, creativity becomes performance, work becomes compliance, and sleep becomes anxiety.
Healthy metrics don’t control you; they illuminate you.
Conclusion: De-gaming Personal Metrics
Focus on inputs, not outputs. Follow your process, not the result. Track the minutes at your desk with the journal open, not the pages filled. You get the process right, and the output will happen. You have little control over a pure number; always attach a feeling score to each data point.
Streaks are perfect targets for Goodhart’s Law. The specter of losing a streak drives us to do toxic things. Destroy your streaks. Build into your programming regular rest days, where you turn the tracker off completely to show the streak that you own the streak, and not the other way around.
Metrics should serve your growth, not steal your joy.
Next week’s blog will be Motivation Without Force: How to Move Forward Without Pushing Yourself. How to create a no-force environment.
Recommended reading
The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Z. Muller
The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, by W. Edwards Deming
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models: Weinberg, Gabriel, McCann, Lauren: 9780525533580: Amazon.com: Books, by Gabriel Weinbert and Lauren McCann
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, by John Doerr
- Note that this book contrasts The Tyranny of Metrics; the tension between corporate performance systems and the organic human behaviors that subvert them
Citations
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