Metric fixation refers to a tendency for decision-makers to place excessively large emphases on selected metrics.
In
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activitie ...
(and many other
social science
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of s ...
fields), decision makers typically use metrics to measure how well a person or an
organization
An organization or organisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is an entity—such as a company, an institution, or an association—comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose.
The word is derived f ...
attain desired goal(s). E.g., a company might use "the number of new customers gained" as a metric to evaluate the success of a
marketing campaign. The issue of metric fixation is said to arise if the decision maker(s) focus excessively on the metrics, often to the point that they treat "attaining desired values on the metrics" as a core goal (instead of simply an indicator of successes). For example, a school may want to improve the number of students who pass a certain test (metric = "number of students who pass"). This is based on the assumption that the said test truly can evaluate students' ability to succeed in the real world (assuming there already is a good definition of what "success" means). If the said test fails to evaluate the students' ability to function in the working world, focusing solely on increasing their scores on this test might cause the school to ignore other learning goals also crucial for real world functioning. As a result, the students' developments might be impaired.
[On the tyranny of metrics and metric fixation](_blank)
''Towards Data Science''.
The concept of metric fixation was first mentioned in the 2018 book ''
The Tyranny of Metrics''. Since then, it has drawn the attention of some management researchers and
data scientists.
See also
*
Statistics
Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...
*
Goodhart's law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on m ...
Reference
Management
Measurement
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