[constantly]

What your saying sounds like profound next level wisdom and on a very surface level does make sense, but think of this: an org can create a measure that captures the relevant preferences properly, and everyone is quite happy with the results because the team continues or slightly modifies what they’re doing and lifts up the product to lift up the measurement and life is good.

And then over time they start realizing they don’t have to lift up the whole product, but just a small piece to increase the measurement. So they do that and the measurement goes up, but the product doesn’t get better because they’ve found the path of least resistance to raising the measure. This is really the underlying crux of Goodharts Law. So it was a good measure probably until it became a target.

So what is a manager to do? “Capture all [the] preferences properly” as you put it? Probably not because that quickly devolves from measurements to long form status reports, not even measurements, because it’s impossible to capture all dimensions of this with measurements, so one has to reduce the dimensionality a little.

This is a philosophical problem not a technical one. Though your point does seem superficially correct, in practice with real teams the second and third order effects from the measure becoming a target dominate.