Too many metrics are killing productivity

During the great famine in China, local officials yanked plants out of the ground and raced ahead of Mao’s itinerary to plant them at his next stop, thus fooling the chairman into thinking bumper crops were everywhere. They kept their jobs and their heads, but as a result, Mao declared there was no famine and refused to release government stores of rice to the starving. Fifty million died. This is the poster child for metrics.

The Tyranny of Metrics is an anecdote-filled examination of how industry, services and government have gone overboard with self-defeating metrics. Muller comes at it from a personal angle as well as a piece of research. He is a history professor, bogged down in the mindless world of forms and stats. It is crippling his own research and networking time, and does nothing to further his field, his career or his own satisfaction.

He says there are three components to the metrics fixation:
-replacing judgment with numerical values
-publicizing numbers to make institutions transparent and accountable
-managing people is to give them numerical targets and evaluations
Ironically, despite all this measurement, productivity is lagging. Make that because of.

This is the Soviet system, where the central authority set goals for factories, services and bureaucracies, and in which workers find ways to achieve those goals at the cost of quality, service, risk-taking and innovation. Examples are students who can pass tests but have little knowledge, subprime mortgages on false applications, police who hide crimes, and banks that open phony accounts for existing customers to meet quotas. Even the federal Government Accounting Office (GAO) got renamed Government Accountability Office, (which managed to prevent confusion by recycling its initials). There is no better way to see this in action than Ken Loach’s Palme D’Or-winning film I Daniel Blake, which shows the UK’s performance-obsessed unemployment office in action. The objective is to spend as little time as possible with customers, and refuse as many as possible for the slightest misstep.

Muller proves his points with perverse outcomes galore. Hospitals keep dying patients alive for 30 days because that’s the measure of treatment success. Surgeons decline to operate on iffy cases for fear of them dying too soon. Creative teachers quit and move to private schools where teaching to the test and abandoning real learning are not the main activities. Universities cripple research in favor of reporting on every aspect of education, right up to how much each graduate is earning ten years later. All their efforts are focused on moving up the rankings in the various, competing lists. The cheating by teachers, administrators and politicians on No Child Left Behind are legendary.

Muller ends with ten points to ponder when you find yourself in an evaluation situation. A simple rule of thumb, he says, is that if the object of your measurements can be by altered by the process of measurement, the results can be less than accurate.

A 2006 survey of HR managers found that metrics and rankings “resulted in lower productivity, inequity, skepticism, decreased employee engagement, reduced collaboration, damage to morale and mistrust in leadership.” So more and more firms do it every year.

David Wineberg