Get the book!

Sketchplanations podcast photo of Rob Bell, Tom Pellereau and Jono Hey

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

London dog size is roughly proportional to the distance from central London

Copied!

👇 Get new sketches each week

Observation courtesy of my wife.

Published 16 Sep 2013

Get the book!

Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

Keep exploring

Goodhart's law illustration showing a manager frustrated by 1000's of tiny nails when measuring on number of nails made, and pulling their hair out when presented with giant nails when measuring on weight

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Chiasmus

Heteronym illustration with the examples: present, windy, read, and close

Heteronym: spell it the same, say it differently

Chihuahua syndrome

Emotional hot potato

The Chinese Zodiac calendar featuring the 12 zodiac animals, their personality traits, and corresponding years from 2025 to 2036. Includes traditional Chinese New Year symbols like lanterns, red envelopes, and firecrackers.

The Chinese Zodiac: Animals, Years, and Meanings

Goodhart's law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, if you pick a measure to assess performance, people find a way to game it. To illustrate, I like the (probably apocryphal) story of a nail factory that sets "Number of nails produced" as its measure of productivity. The workers figure out they can easily make tons of tiny nails to hit the target. Yet, when the frustrated managers switch the assessment to "weight of nails made", the workers again outfox them by making a few giant heavy nails. And there's the story of measuring fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find the pedometer attached to the dog. Some strategies for helping this are to try and find better, harder-to-game measures, assess with multiple measures, or allow a little discretion. More detail in this nice little article. I also liked an idea I read in Measure What Matters of pairing a quantity measure with a quality measure, for example, assessing both the number of nails and customer satisfaction of the nails. How strongly Goodhart's Law applies varies. John Cutler shared the Cutler Variation of Goodhart's Law: "In environments with high psychological safety, trust, and an appreciation for complex sociotechnical systems, when a measure becomes a target, it can remain a good measure because missing the target is treated as a valuable signal for continuous improvement rather than failure." Related Ideas to Goodhart's Law Also see: Campbell's Law The Cobra Effect The Law of Unintended ConsequencesGoodhart's law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, if you pick a measure to assess performance, people find a way to game it. To illustrate, I like the (probably apocryphal) story of a nail factory that sets "Number of nails produced" as its measure of productivity. The workers figure out they can easily make tons of tiny nails to hit the target. Yet, when the frustrated managers switch the assessment to "weight of nails made", the workers again outfox them by making a few giant heavy nails. And there's the story of measuring fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find the pedometer attached to the dog. Some strategies for helping this are to try and find better, harder-to-game measures, assess with multiple measures, or allow a little discretion. More detail in this nice little article. I also liked an idea I read in Measure What Matters of pairing a quantity measure with a quality measure, for example, assessing both the number of nails and customer satisfaction of the nails. How strongly Goodhart's Law applies varies. John Cutler shared the Cutler Variation of Goodhart's Law: "In environments with high psychological safety, trust, and an appreciation for complex sociotechnical systems, when a measure becomes a target, it can remain a good measure because missing the target is treated as a valuable signal for continuous improvement rather than failure." Related Ideas to Goodhart's Law Also see: Campbell's Law The Cobra Effect The Law of Unintended Consequences

Newer

RRandom

Older

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.