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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The best example was years ago, in software. Some company decided to give bonuses based on the number of bugs fixed.
So what happened? Engineers started to write bug filled, awful code.
They were measured by the number of bugs they fixed, so they just created more bugs to fix.
Essentially, you’re changing the motivation from “do a good job at X” to “do a good job at this very specific number we are using to try to see if you are good at X.”
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