When a metric starts directing the work
Targets reshape the work they are meant to measure
In 2016, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $100 million for widespread illegal sales practices. The agency found that sales targets and compensation incentives had spurred employees to open deposit accounts and apply for credit cards without customers’ knowledge or consent.
Every employee who opened an account carried responsibility for that action. The enforcement action also exposed a management system. Its designers had selected a result, linked it to compensation, and made it a target. The sales figure counted products opened for each customer. Consent, customer harm, and the fees created by those accounts required other records and other checks.
That sequence shows how a metric changes its role.
Every organisation needs measures. Revenue, delivery dates, response times, defect rates, and completed requests help people compare periods, allocate resources, and identify a change that requires attention. A metric becomes a target when evaluations, rewards, or decisions depend on its value. It then directs part of the work that it was originally meant to describe.
Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder call this effect reactivity. Their study of law-school rankings examined how public measures reshape the expectations and choices of the institutions they evaluate. The mechanism also appears in ordinary work. A support team assessed by the number of closed tickets can give priority to simple requests. A project team rewarded for meeting a date can hand over work whose later correction falls to another group. A time-reporting system can reward regular entries while overlooking the judgement that resolved a difficult case.
Each result may be accurate. The difficulty begins when people use it to support a conclusion beyond its scope. A count of closed tickets describes closed tickets. A delivery measure describes delivery. Service quality, safety, customer confidence, and organisational learning require evidence designed for those purposes.
Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss offered a useful way to understand this gap. Work becomes visible through the categories and indicators chosen for it. Forms, databases, and software record events for which someone has created a field, a status, or a code. An exception, an objection, an informal check, or a delayed decision needs a place in the record. When that place is absent, the event becomes harder to communicate, compare, and examine.
The choice of categories also shapes professional judgement. Qualifications and previous results make parts of a career comparable. The record of a difficult case can show how someone recognised an anomaly, paused a risky action, and changed a procedure when the case no longer matched the rule. A final score usually compresses that sequence into an outcome.
The practical task for management follows directly. Every significant metric needs a stated decision, a calculation rule, a named owner for the data, and a method for reviewing adverse effects. The review must include the cases that the metric handles poorly, because those cases test the adequacy of the categories used in the report.
This standard gives a dashboard a concrete role. It links the result to the decision it informs, the evidence that supports it, and the conditions that could require a different judgement. It also distributes responsibility: one person defines the objective, another enters or validates the data, a third reviews the exceptions, and the decision-maker accepts the consequence of acting on the result.
The Wells Fargo case returns us to the basic point. The sales figure had become authoritative before the bank had established that the transactions represented customer choices. A stronger control system would have connected the sales result to consent, complaints, fees, and independent review.
Putting a number on a screen takes little time. A reliable decision requires the history of the number, the incentives attached to it, and the authority to revise the result when the evidence changes.
Sources
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Fines Wells Fargo $100 Million for Widespread Illegal Practice of Secretly Opening Unauthorized Accounts”, 8 September 2016.
- Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder, “Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds”, American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 2007, pp. 1–40.
- Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work”, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 1999, pp. 9–30.