A WORKED EXAMPLE
The number that became the purpose
A worked example – How a useful measure turns into the thing it was meant to serve – and the test that tells you when it has.
Start with something unobjectionable: a team picks a number to watch. Response time, say, or weekly active users, or units shipped. The number is chosen well – it stands for something real that is otherwise hard to see, and watching it genuinely helps. For a while, everything about it is healthy.
A measure like this is a kind of window. Its whole value is that you can see through it to the thing that matters – the number is never the point; the point is what the number lets you watch. Hold that, and the measure does its work.
Then, quietly, the window becomes a wall. The number stops pointing through itself to the thing and becomes the thing. Hitting it becomes the job. People optimise the measure directly – trimming, reclassifying, working the edges – and the number obligingly rises, while the reality it was meant to track drifts away from it, unwatched, because everyone is now looking at the glass instead of through it. Nobody decided this. It happened by the ordinary gravity of attention: what gets rewarded gets pursued, and the number was what got rewarded.
Here is the move worth seeing, because it is the whole of it. There are two questions you can ask, and they look almost identical: how do we hit the number? and what was the number standing for, and is it still standing for it? The first keeps you inside the wall. The second is the only one that can tell you the window has closed – and it is precisely the question that stops being asked, because the number is going up, and a rising number is the most effective anaesthetic there is for the question of whether it still means anything.
Here is the move worth seeing, because it is the whole of it. There are two questions you can ask, and they look almost identical: how do we hit the number? and what was the number standing for, and is it still standing for it? The first keeps you inside the wall. The second is the only one that can tell you the window has closed – and it is precisely the question that stops being asked, because the number is going up, and a rising number is the most effective anaesthetic there is for the question of whether it still means anything.
You can test it directly. Ask what would have to be true for the number to rise while the thing it tracks gets worse. If you cannot construct that case, the measure is still a window. If you can – and can recognise it in front of you – you have found where the glass went opaque.
The distinction is not the number is bad. The number was good; that is what made it dangerous. The distinction is between a measure still serving its purpose and one that has quietly made itself the purpose – between a thing that feeds what it stands over and one that has begun to feed on it. That is the question. It is the one the rising number was keeping you from.
This is one of the moves the programme makes visible. The full account of what it is and how it works is here.