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by sixdimensional 1627 days ago
This, to me, is a general problem with a purely quantified, metrics driven approach to management, not just limited to NPS. I'm not demonizing these approaches, just saying that you have to balance humanity with data.

I like to look at this kind of thing as the one of the dark sides/dark patterns of using data for decisionmaking.

Qualitative measures are important, as is maintaining as much humanity as possible, to have a balanced and healthy culture. Being solely metrics/data driven can lead to cold, heartless, damaging culture (might be efficient or make profit, but very dehumanizing).

1 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”

Related is Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

My favorite story related to this, because the managers thought LoC would be a good measure of productivity, is "-2000 lines of code": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Thank you for this very interesting share, I had not heard of this before!