“Gaming the numbers” happens when people respond rationally to poorly designed targets, incentives, and performance metrics. These posts explore how fear, quotas, and simplistic scorecards lead people to manipulate data, hide problems, or optimize appearances instead of improving the system.
Drawing on examples from healthcare, government, finance, sports, and everyday work, this archive reflects a core Lean lesson: when metrics are misused, the system teaches people to game the numbers rather than fix the work. Real improvement requires better measures, better leadership, and less blame.
Note: Welcome LEI visitors… you can check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org, as I hope you’ll come back. Here are some other recent posts: Where Did I Start With Lean? One Purple Audacious Goal Caution! Warning Signs in…
NBA, Olympic coach Chuck Daly dies at 78 I grew up outside of Detroit during the Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” era so I spent a lot of time watching Chuck Daly, who just passed away yesterday. Daly had a reputation…
Why ‘Quality’ Care Is Dangerous – WSJ.com Yesterday’s WSJ opinion piece by Dr. Jerome Goopman (author of How Doctors Think) and Pamela Hartzband caught my eye. Thanks to the four or five of you who also emailed me the link…
Family Business – WSJ.com In today’s WSJ, there’s a review of a new book called Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting, in the mold of the excellent book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Who…
Code red in the nation’s hospital corridors | CLOSE UP Thanks to Michael from New Zealand for pointing this story to me. The link above has an 11 minute video on from their equivalent of a 60 Minutes type show.…
Why Incentives Are Effective, Irresistible, and Almost Certain to Backfire | Fast Company Just about when I start thinking “Is Fast Company magazine relevant anymore, should I renew my subscription?”, a gem like this appears. It’s a very old lesson,…
Baylor Rewards Freshmen Who Retake SAT – NYTimes.com Baylor Newspaper Article Show me a ranking system and I’ll show you a way to “game the system” to manipulate the apparent results. You see this with sales quotas, annual bonus plans,…
Updated 11/17/08 10 PM central If you have WSJ access, check out today’s article “Stores Count Seconds to Trim Labor Costs”. I thought, oh no punitive Taylorism… And sure enough they reference Taylor. Be sure to see the end of…
TL;DR: When leaders impose arbitrary targets without improving the underlying system, people will find ways to hit the number without helping the patient. The problem isn’t the people — it’s the design. I’m here in the UK for work, and…
The Associated Press: FAA tries again to fix cover-up of air safety errors: It’s always disturbing to hear about cover ups and systemic problems related to aviation safety, whether it’s airplane maintenance or air traffic control. In this case, it’s…
If there was any value to the Industry Week commentary that tried to link Deming and Obama, it was that it prompted me to re-read some of Deming’s work, namely the “management of people” chapter from The New Economics. There’s…
Starbucks Gossip: Howard Schultz apparently hasn’t put the brakes on warm sandwiches Following up on last week’s post on Starbucks operations, I found an example of “gaming the numbers” in a different post. “Gaming the numbers” is a common phenomenon…
