I can confirm this. We've standardized Goodhart's law creating a 90-day rotation requirement for KPIs. We found that managers would reuse the same performance indicators with minor variations and put them on sticky notes to make them easier to target.
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If your managers are doing that it's a strong signal your KPIs are a distraction and your managers are acting rationally within the system they're been placed.
They need something they can check easily so the team can get back to work. It's hard to find metrics that are both meaningful to the business and track with the work being asked of the team.
What kind of KPIs aren't either disconnected from what people actually do or validation of Goodhart's law?
The ones not used to judge people.
You can look at revenue and decide "hey, we have a problem here" and go research what's causing the problem. That's a perfectly valid used for a KPI.
You can do some change by something like the Toyota process, saying "we will improve X", make the change, and track X out to see if you must revert or keep it. That is another perfectly valid use for a KPI.
What you can't do is use them to judge people.
Many of them.
Its easy to fake one metric, it harder to consistenly paly around 100 of them.
(But then it’s no longer KPIs probably, as one looking at the data needs to recognise that details and nuance are important)
Wow. That is an extremely cool idea - new to me.
Do you have enough KPIs that you can be sure that these targets also serve as useful metrics for the org as a whole? Do you randomize the assignment every quarter?
As I talk through this ... have you considered keeping some "hidden KPIs"?
I'm riffing on password rotation requirements and the meta-nature of trying to make Goodhart's law a target. I could've been a bit more obviously sarcastic.
well i think it also highlights that the seeds of truly interesting ideas are often buried in or can be found in jokes/intentionally bad ideas... or, at least, nearly all my best ideas originated from joke ideas-- ones that were not even intended to be constructive, instructive, etc. ... just jokes-- trying to reflect some truth about the world in a way that cuts to the core of it.
can't say what the deep idea in this case is per se (haha (maybe the other commenter can shed light on that part)), but i guess if you have enough KPIs to be able to rotate them you have yourself a perpetual motion machine of the same nature as the one that some genius carried down from the mountain on stone tablets that we can sustain maximum velocity ad infinitum by splitting our work into two week chunks and calling them "sprints"... why haven't marathoners thought of this? (h/t Rich Hickey, the source of that amazing joke that i butcher here)
maybe consciousness itself is nothing more than the brain managing to optimize all of its KPIs at the same time.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of constantly changing our methods of assessment.
A 90 day target is questionable, but regularly changing the metrics are a good way to keep people from gaming them.
I mean, Poe's Law [0] and all, but I was quite surprised your comment was interpreted as anything but saracasm.
Anyone who's worked a few jobs would read the comment and go "sure, I've worked under managers like that". It's not obvious sarcasm when the description is just something that happens.