Goodhart's Law
Charles Goodhart · 1975
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Any metric that starts as a rough proxy for something you care about degrades once you tie rewards to it. People optimize for the number, not the thing. Test scores, LOC written, closed tickets, likes — all Goodhart-vulnerable.
The mechanism is straightforward: measures approximate reality imperfectly. If the gap between measure and reality has any slack, incentives push behavior into that slack. Better metrics reduce but never eliminate the gap. The remedy is triangulation — multiple weak metrics beat one strong one, and qualitative review catches what numbers miss.
A support team is measured only on 'tickets closed per day.' What's the classic Goodhart failure?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Goodhart's Law: Its Origins, Meaning, and ImplicationsWikipedia
The French Garden and the English Garden
"New systems are usually built like French formal gardens — a geometry imposed from above that flattens whatever was already there — when they could instead be built like English landscape gardens, which study the existing terrain and work with what's already load-bearing."