The Tyranny of Metrics
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Average rating3.7
How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.
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Metrics are used everywhere and you must have encountered (or have been evaluated on) some quirky or even stupid ones. This book attacks this almost religious view a lot of us have on metrics and question their so-called objectivity, highlighting a lot of cases where metrics provoked really bad impacts (from keeping patients artificially alive to ensure they last enough days to not count toward one to refusing to believe rape victims to avoid increasing a sector's crimes number). It's a great wake up call asking us to reflect on how usage of metrics, when and how to use them and to bring back our power of judgment and qualitative analysis in the face of the sacred numbers.
A truly must read for anyone nowadays I would say.
Poorly written and poorly argued. I wanted to like this book but it turned out to be repetitive and without substance. Sad, because we do need a much better discussion around metrics.
I'm all for metrics, so having some arguments on what to look for to avoid their pitfalls is useful.
I think it is a useful book and correctly points to when metrics have been used wrongly, specially in the public realm.
Some sources of dysfunction
If promotion/salary relies heavily on metrics then people may distort their work incurring in different kind of schemes.
- Do work that affects the metric only, and stop working on more important but not measured tasks.
- Work on easy targets only to improve some ratio. For instance a school that does not accept problematic kids to get better graduation rates.
- Lower standards. If success ratio < 2s is too low, just change to 2.5seconds and you improved your SLO. Airlines adding 30min to flytime just so they can land ahead of time every time.
- Change classification of tasks. For instance police booking felonies as misdemeanors to “improve” crime rate in the area.
- If a lot of money is on the line, some people will simply doctor the numbers
“Some metrics are better than no metrics” is commonly said what in practice means there is no dedicated time or resources, so only what's easily measurable gets measured. Instead of what's important to measure. Again focus falls into what's not important.
Related: Many roles at work has a lot of types of tasks. It is very difficult to measure 360 degrees of that, measuring only partially distorts how people perform those roles. Example: measure code commits for engineers.
Picking metrics that work somewhere else and applying them in your context. Because they are coming from the industry they look authoritative but they could totally miss the mark in your particular environment and be counterproductive.
Solution
The book does not give much in terms of solutions but the one thing it puts forward is:
Create metrics that are created in the consensus of the experts, bottom-up , not top down.
So for instance each engineering team would gather and agree on what makes sense for them to track and hold accountable for, instead of the CTO or something saying every engineering team will be measured by this or that.
