It goes “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” How does that work in practice?
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Often people want one thing but can’t measure if they are making progress so they measure something similar. This will lead to other people gaming the system to seem like progress is being made even if it isn’t.
There is a story from the historical time period when Brittain ruled India. In India, there are snakes and the Brits were having none of that. They wanted to get rid of the snakes, but you can’t really measure how many snakes exist in India. As a close enough thing, the British decided to reward anyone who brought them dead snakes, thinking that the Indian natives would kill the snakes for these rewards and initially a few probably did. After a while however, the Indians started growing their own snakes to kill, so they could then butcher them and sell them to the British. This went on for a while, but for obvious reasons, the amount of snakes wasn’t going anywhere. After the British caught wind of what was going on, they did what felt logical can discontinued the bounty program, which simply made the Indians release their snakes to the wild, increasing the amount of snakes.
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