What Breaks When a Measure Becomes the Main Target?
What Breaks When a Measure Becomes the Main Target? How Goodhart’s Law quietly sabotages your metrics, teams, and strategy Big Picture Box When a measure becomes the main target, it stops being a reliable window into reality. That’s the heart of the question “what breaks when a measure becomes the main target?” —you don’t just distort the metric; you distort behavior, systems, and learning. This is the practical face of Goodhart’s Law, coined by Charles Goodhart: once people are rewarded or punished directly on a single number, they start optimizing the number instead of the outcome. In this post, you’ll see what actually breaks, how to spot it early, and how to design targets that guide action instead of warping it. Why Measures Break When They Become Targets When a metric becomes the target, four fracture lines usually appear. 1. Behavior Starts to Warp People do what you pay them to do, not what you meant to pay them to do. Support teams optimize t...