Performance targets distort actual work toward what is measured

Evidence

Anxiety about falling standards in school examinations is now a regular feature of the summertime in Britain. Yet if students are less skilled and knowledgeable than their predecessors, this is due not to a decline in the quality of examinations per se, but to the fact that all of the teaching is geared towards passing the exams. Narrowly focused ‘exam drill’ replaces a wider engagement with subjects. Similarly, hospitals perform many routine procedures instead of a few serious, urgent operations, because this allows them to hit the targets they are assessed on (operating rates, success rates and reduction in waiting time) more effectively. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 93

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: a piece on ‘Goodhart’s law in everyday life’ tracing how schools and hospitals gaming their own targets (rather than any ‘decline’) explains public anxieties about falling standards. Correlates with the canonical ‘when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure’.
• XREF: connects to: Audit systems incentivize institutions to grade themselves lower than deserved — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 104; Design choices optimizing for one task can cripple performance on the real task — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 1221; Optimizing for stated goals produces monstrous outcomes — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 655 (+5 more)

Related

• Audit targets reshape institutional activity toward whatever is measured (similarity 0.87)
• Target-driven institutions substitute easy measurable tasks for meaningful ones (similarity 0.85)
• Performance targets become ends in themselves wherever they are imposed (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Audit targets reshape institutional activity toward whatever is measured #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 93
• Design choices optimizing for one task can cripple performance on the real task #corroborates (0.92) — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 1221
• Software performance measurement changed manager behavior even without their understanding CAPM #exemplifies (0.85) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1137
• Optimizing for stated goals produces monstrous outcomes #expands (0.80) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 655