Practice question · Multiple choice
A support team bonused on calls per hour sees volume soar and resolution collapse. Goodhart's law names the pattern. What is the deeper design failure?
Hints
- Ask what the firm actually wanted, and what it actually measured.
- The agents did exactly what they were paid to do. Where is the failure?
Show the answer
A. The metric was a proxy, and stakes make people optimise proxies
Why
Nobody cheated, calls per hour genuinely rose, and that is the point: a measure ceases to be a good measure once it becomes a target. Balanced scorecards and paired metrics exist to make gaming one dimension visible in another, since no single proxy survives being optimised.
Practise Control Systems
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