Learn to Think in Color

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...

How Can You Measure Progress Today, Rather Than Just by the Outcomes? Why momentum matters more than milestones (especially in the short term) Today’s Results vs. Today’s Progress When progress is defined only by outcomes—sales closed, weight lost, projects finished—we miss the powerful, motivating evidence of forward motion that happens every day. Measuring progress today means recognizing momentum, not just milestones. In this post, we’ll explore how to track your daily efforts, measure what matters in the short-term, and build a progress mindset that sustains motivation. The Problem With Only Measuring Outcomes Most traditional metrics are lagging indicators—they tell you what  already  happened. Revenue, grades, or launch dates reflect past actions. This can be disheartening when the work you do today won’t yield results until weeks or months later. Relying solely on outcomes to define progress creates a binary success/failure view that can sap motivation. Instead, we need...

What Will the World Look Like in 5 Years? A Systems Analysis of Converging Discontinuities The Premise: We’re Measuring the Wrong Variables Most future analysis fails because it extrapolates from visible trends rather than examining the invisible structures that generate those trends. The next five years won’t be defined by AI getting smarter or climate getting worse—they’ll be defined by the breakdown of the measurement systems we use to understand reality itself. The Core Insight : We’re approaching a phase transition where our existing categories of analysis (economic, technological, political, social) become insufficient to describe what’s actually happening. I. The Measurement Crisis Why Our Metrics Are Breaking Down By 2030, the fundamental disconnect between what we measure and what matters reaches a breaking point. GDP, unemployment rates, and carbon emissions are industrial-age metrics trying to quantify post-industrial realities. The Hidden Pattern : Every major societal shif...