If we want to know if we have achieved our objectives we need to measure progress and results – right! well that is what the standard business model says we should do. And it works fine for things that are the same and can be counted easily such as tins of food coming of a production line but for most of us our objectives are more complex than that.

For example I used be the Chair of Governors of a secondary school which was under pressure from the Government to improve its exam results. The exams were graded A to F and we had to increase the percentage of students getting 5 A to Cs. Now from a business perspective it would make sense to divide the students into three groups:

• those would get 5 A to C anyway
• those who would never get 5 A to C no matter how hard we tried and
• those  who could with help

and then we could concentrate our resources on the third group. But of course this is not what was intended as our job was to enable each student to achieve the best they could.

But the intention was not being measured and what was being measured was actively working against the intention. Obviously if we achieved the intention it would show up as an improvement in the exam results but by actively pursuing the measure we would be working against the intention.

The problem is that we cannot easily measure the intention to enable each student to achieve the best they could, so the government settled for a proxy measure which could easily drive perverse behaviour. Our public and business world is riddled with these proxy measures where we cannot easily measure the true intentions and they are driving perverse behaviours.

This was illustrated by a doctors surgery recently which wrote to the parents of young children who had refused to let their children be given the MMR vaccination and told them their children were being removed from their lists. They would still treat them but that the children would not be formally registered. Why did they do this, it was because if a surgery’s percentage take up for the MMR vaccination dropped below 85% they lost funding!

Why are patients kept waiting in ambulances when the arrive at hospital. It is because hospitals have to see all patients within 4 hours but the time starts when they leave the ambulance!!

By all means count what can be counted and see what information you can glean but be very careful in setting proxy measures as some form of target or goal because it can drive some very perverse behaviours.

Peter Fryer, 22nd October 2013

Guest speaker at Module B London November 2013