Out Before Dawn for Vacation

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #1
SJC Airport - Sat, 31 Aug 2024. 5:30am

Today's an early day. We set our alarms for 4am and were out the door by 5am. Now it's 5:30am, we're at the airport and settled in at our gate, and the sun's still not up for the day. Sunrise is still an hour away. *Yawn*

We're headed off to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina for the next week or so. Today we're flying to Charlotte, NC, with a connection in St. Louis. Once on the ground in NC we'll pick up a rental car and drive to Roanoke, VA. It's a lot of flying and driving for today, but it will set us up to start enjoying the outdoors and hiking tomorrow.

But for now... Our flight should start boarding in about 40 minutes. I'm looking forward to boarding quickly, getting a good seat, and nodding off for a nap.

Highlights and Lowlights in St. Louis

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #2
STL Airport - Sat, 31 Aug 2024. 1pm

Our flights to Charlotte, NC include a connection in St. Louis, MO. Our early morning flight from home left on time, thankfully. It's sad to call that a highlight, but here we are. Oh, but there was another highlight, this one at 37,000' over the eastern Nevada desert....



I got the whole can of water. The WHOLE CAN.

Y'know, because when you ask for "water", you get a little cup with maybe 5oz. in it. So this time I asked, with a smile and a bit of a laugh, "Water, please. And make it a double!"

The flight attendant stared at me blankly.

"I'm asking for two cups of water. Can you bring me two cups?"

"Uh," she paused. "How about I bring you the can?"

The whole can?! BALLER!

Pizza. Cooked in a Vending Machine.

The lowlight of the trip so far came when I went looking for lunch in St. Louis. The restaurants in the E terminal there are kind of slim pickin's. I mean, if you want a beer, there are, like, 8 places to sit and drink one. But if you want solid food? That's not pure sugar?

Then I saw it. A pizza vending machine.

I love pizza. And I've had some terrible pizza in the past so I figured, how bad can it be? Answer: pizza from a vending machine is about as stupid as it sounds.



The pizza came undercooked. And with about 3x too much sauce. And very little cheese. And possibly worst of all, it was't sliced properly. It started disintegrating in my fingers when I tried pulling the half-cut slices apart. Thankfully Hawk had a spare spork in her bag. I ended up eating the pizza like a hybrid between a pizza and a plate of stew.

Metrics: Gaming the System

Recently I've been writing about the use of metrics in the workplace, especially the pitfalls of using them poorly or simplistically. The pitfall I'm writing about in this chapter is how when a measure becomes the objective it ceases to be a good measure.

This is often called Goodhart's Law (Wikipedia link), based on the writings of a British economist who challenged UK economic policy in the 1970s:

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
-- Charles Goodhart, 1975

The adage was later generalized to other areas of policy, especially once stated in the less dry terms I used above. (That restatement was published by Marilyn Strathern in 1997.) But as it applies to the use of measures in business, or even in government policy, there's an earlier observation that states the problem even better, Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
-- Donald T. Campbell, 1969

Campbell's formulation is a bit dry and academic, too, so let me offer my own restatement: When a system focuses on simple measures, there's risk people will game the system.

Gaming the system is what happened when salesperson "Missy" scheduled bullshit sales calls to earn bonuses and accolades, as I described in a previous blog. Her behavior was a corruption of what the company intended to achieve, which was to increase sales and reward people who contributed to that. Instead Missy contributed nothing to sales, and wasted other people's time in the process, and collected extra pay for it.

It's worth noting that not all instances of gaming the system are as harmful as Missy's. Sometimes employees game the system but only cheat themselves. I've seen plenty of instances in sales, for example, where employees are asked to complete a small bit of training and fake their way through it. This has often happened when pressure is applied through management. Managers are held to account for 100% of their staff completing the task. It becomes a statistic displayed on the screen at weekly meetings of the management team in front of senior executives. Managers then turn to their employees and say things like, "Just get the green check-mark" -- putting the emphasis on securing the indicator of success instead of absorbing the training and learning from it to actually become more successful at the job.

So, do witty sayings like Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law mean that all metrics are doomed? Hardly. They're really arguments that poor or simplistic metrics, and excessive focus on single metrics as indicators of success, cannot replace comprehensive understanding of actual success.