Metric Gaming
Your organisation optimised for the metric and lost sight of the thing the metric was supposed to measure.
One who speaks truth from the heart surpasses those who practice austerity and charity. Valluvar ranks honesty above ritual. Truth from the heart, not truth from the spreadsheet. All your KPIs are green. Every target is met. Every dashboard shows progress. Customers are leaving. Employees are disengaged. The product is deteriorating. The numbers are technically accurate. The story they tell is fiction. Your organisation optimised for the metric and lost sight of the thing the metric was supposed to measure.
Target’s 2013 data breach exposed 40 million customer credit card numbers. I found the metric gaming buried in the incident report. Target’s security team, contracted through FireEye, had detected the intrusion and sent alerts. The alerts were categorized, logged, and deprioritized because the team was measured on ‘incidents resolved per quarter,’ not ‘incidents prevented.’ The metric incentivized closing tickets, not preventing breaches. When the attackers exfiltrated 11 GB of card data, the security system was functioning perfectly. By its own metrics.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In economics, Goodhart’s Law states that any metric used for control will be optimised at the expense of the thing it was designed to measure. The metric gets gamed. The underlying reality gets ignored. Organizational metric gaming follows this law perfectly: teams learn what’s measured, then optimise for the measurement. Lines of code shipped. Tickets closed. Features delivered. Calls answered. Each metric is hit. Each underlying reality, code quality, customer satisfaction, product value, call resolution, deteriorates. The dashboard is green. The organisation is bleeding.
Look at your top three KPIs. Now ask: is it possible to hit every target and still fail the customer? If yes, your metrics are measuring the wrong thing. Rebuild them from the customer’s experience backward, not from your dashboard forward.
That green illusion has a name. Metric Gaming. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Gaming started when the metric became the target. The team learned what was measured, optimised for the measurement, and lost sight of what the metric was supposed to represent.
Navigate
Every KPI is paired with a counter-metric that detects gaming. If ticket resolution drops but customer satisfaction also drops, the improvement is illusory.
Tool
CORE / Transparency: the diagnostic that asks whether metrics reflect reality or perform reality. Transparency reveals the gap between the dashboard and the customer.
Implement
Look at your top three KPIs. Ask: is it possible to hit every target and still fail the customer? If yes, rebuild the metrics from the customer experience backward.
Emerge
When metrics measure outcomes instead of activity, gaming becomes obvious, real performance is visible, and the organisation optimises for value instead of vanity.