Metrics are not goals

When a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a meaningful metric.

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A friend of mine jokingly hypothesized today that you could measure the popularity of a professional sports team by noting how many of its fans go to jail the night the team wins the championship.

It's a little funny, but there might be something to it: “Fans were so excited for the win that an estimated 83% of revelers were arrested for disturbing the peace, local police said today.”

But even if we decided it was a useful metric, imagine how meaningless it would become if fans began trying to prove their loyalty by striving to increase their team’s “Jailed Fans at Championship Win” rate.

Developing a fanatical fan base may be an important objective for team owners.

But surely their real goals have more to do with profitability and long-term sustainability of the organization.

Instigating a campaign to get more of their fans arrested probably isn't exactly fruitful.

Here's the thing:

When metrics become goals in themselves, we get an effect commonly known as “gaming the system.”

Because we’re all influenced by incentives, and having great results in one metric or another is a quik way to appear successful.

Think about this in other ways:

• Your email open rate.

• Event, participant satisfaction surveys.

• Time spent to complete a common task.

All of those can be useful metrics. But they’re not actually goals.

If they were real goals, you might be justified in arguing for sensational and deceptive subject lines to get that open rate up. In truth, that’s probably counter to your real mission goals.

It’s the mission that matters.

The metrics are just one measure of early successes on the way to the actual mission goals.

All the best,
A.