What get’s measured get’s managed. What gets targeted gets traumatised.

A slight variation on a (probably wrongly attributed) Peter Drucker quote, but I think that this helps to remove some of the nuance from the original.  

We all know that the right data and reporting are absolutely key to the successful management of any business. But often measurement and metrics gets conflated with targets.

A few years back everyone got very excited when they found out about Google using OKRs and we all decided that by implementing this simple process would turn us into the next billion dollar unicorn.

There were videos and SaaS products and everyone spent (many, many hours) coming up with convoluted Objectives and then tried to attach weird Key Results to them. One to ones became an hour of mental gymnastics working out what the key result of having enough milk in the fridge, rather than a time for people to spend time off the tools understanding what it was that was working and not working.

Now in and off itself an OKR isn’t a bad thing. Done correctly, and in the right context, it can be a really useful way of driving the right behaviour. But unfortunately they were adopted indiscriminately, usually by people with no real clue how to do it effectively.

This was great for people that like to run things by spreadsheet or dash board. Suddenly managers had loads of data and RAG statuses to discuss in their meetings. But, in my experience, they mostly had very little impact on the performance of the business. In fact, net/net I would say they negatively impacted productivity as they just gave everyone another layer of ‘work’ to do on top of the day job.

The point is that measurement isn’t the problem. Measuring things in a business is vital. But a measure alone doesn’t impact behaviour. So we set a target. Because that certainly does. But not necessarily in the right way. And with high achieving, box tickers (I.e. 95% of the agency world) the target becomes the, increasingly stress inducing, job.

If the target is wrong, this can very easily cause more harm than good, and see a lot of time wasted working in the wrong direction.

So beware weaponising your data setting targets.  Often “In the right direction” is a good enough.

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