Wrong metrics drive wrong behaviours

Adi
Jul 28, 2023

And ,the world is full of such examples

1. McNamara Fallacy — Originates from the Vietnam War, in which enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success. (In contrast to WW2 ,when enemy territory occupied was the metric)
The rest,as they say, is history.
Source — https://lnkd.in/e-qUm-N5

2. Mao’s great leap forward — “Targets in water conservancy were measured by the number of tonnes of earth a province could move.This magic number — entirely unrelated to the usefulness of the projects being undertaken — was then compared nationwide”
Source: Mao’s great famine by Frank Dikotter

Wrong #metrics in the enterprise world have similar negative impact on people.
Examples include: Lines of code, utilization, number of defects, estimation accuracy …

#agility #metrics #waysofworking #smartwaysofwork #enterprise

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Adi

I help ​tech and biz teams change into simpler, smarter and safer units