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POSH: Port Out Starboard Home (apocryphal)

Sadly it turns out that there is not reliable evidence for this derivation of the word POSH, but it’s so nice I’d finished the sketchplanation before I knew it. The story went that if you were travelling by boat from Western Europe to India and the Far East by boat back in the day the rich people naturally took the best cabins. And the best cabins on the way Out, were on the Port side so you got a great view of the coast all the way around Africa. And on the way back on the Starboard site to enjoy the view once more. Et voila POSH as a synonym for rich. After much digging I had to conclude that the story was apocryphal, but it’s nice nonetheless.

I apologise for maintaining this rumour.

Published 16 Apr 2015

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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.

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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 their measure of productivity and the workers figure out they can make tons of tiny nails to hit the target easily. 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 trying to measure fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find the pedometer gets 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." Also see: Campbell's Law I revised the illustration. Here is the original…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 their measure of productivity and the workers figure out they can make tons of tiny nails to hit the target easily. 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 trying to measure fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find the pedometer gets 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." Also see: Campbell's Law I revised the illustration. Here is the original

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