What gets measured gets manipulated

摘要

In years to come, the Windrush debacle that dominated media headlines earlier this year will be a prize exhibit in the management - as well as political - museum of horrors. At one level, it is a terrible warning of the dangers of getting measurement wrong. The choosing of measures is one of the most important and deceptively simple things managers do -after all, we all know that what gets measured gets managed, don't we? And that's precisely the problem. Because we also know that while "managers start off trying to manage what they want, [they] finish up wanting what they can measure", as strategy writer Igor Ansoff described one of management's besetting sins. The easiest, most obvious thing they can use to measure with is targets.