Goodhart’s law

Many front-line staff are allergic to operational processes in the workplace.

Goodhart’s law (i.e. when a measure becomes a target it’s no longer a good measure) warns us against attending too rigidly to compliance metrics, but how can standards be kept and quality assured?

Leaders might not consider the relational implications inherent in assessing performance. How does the quality of your interaction with appraisees relate to performance? To attend to relational processes is to leverage something beyond numerical value - relationships and culture.

By relational processes I mean anything that happens between people, but formal meetings exemplify the idea well. What values, conscious or unconscious, do the relational processes in your organisation communicate? How are meetings structured? Who speaks first? What can’t be said?

Does the nature of the relational processes within your organisation allow you to hypothesise about the roots of your primary workplace dilemmas? What would be the impact of sharing your hypothesis with colleagues? For example:

When I do any manual work I work hard and fast. This is strongly conditioned by growing up in a farming family in rural Ireland. When I was the ‘work monk’ at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery and tasked with coordinating the planting of thousands of trees, my conditioned habits were out of whack with my environment. Verbalising what I noticed about myself (i.e. a drive to GET IT DONE!), and the impact this might have on others, mitigated misalignment.