Goodhart’s Law Isn’t as Useful as You Might Think
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, and this is unfortunately true more often than not. Thankfully, W. Edwards Deming and his colleagues have developed a body of work known as Statistical Process Control, which offers a number of principles to help solve Goodhart’s Law at the organisational level. Donald Wheeler’s formulation of the law, which states that metrics should be difficult to distort, data should be difficult to distort and people should be given space to improve the system, is a particularly useful one, as it offers a more actionable and solvable version of Goodhart’s Law. Read full article here