The Tyranny of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
Two Cheers for Anarchism!, just not too much of it.
I spent this weekend celebrating my birthday in Ocean Springs, Mississippi with my wife and some family friends. For me, any road trip is a chance to catch up on my Podcasts or Audiobooks which I really appreciate. This trip was no different as I re-read (re-listened to or whatever) Two Cheers for Anarchism by James Scott [1]. You can buy it, or like a good anarchist read it online here. The first time I read it I was a newly minted US Army Master Diver and the US Army War College had just released an article that was causing some waves throughout the service called Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession [2]. The basic premise of which is that the system in place called “The Army” was fundamentally flawed because the annual metrics that we were using, which are more commonly known as KPI’s in the civilian world were impossible to complete in a standard year of work. In essence, we really did have a 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag problem. The net result of which meant that in order to comply with these impossible requirements we lie. We don’t call it a lie, we call it “pencil whipping”, or “check the block”, but a lie by any other name is still a lie. At that time, I was not terribly focused on systematic design, so my first reading of Two Cheers for Anarchism didn’t make as many mental connections for me then. But the second reading this weekend after I had just spent time reworking some KPI’s at my day job led to some interesting thoughts. Last time, I was way more excited that the Army would face their systematic problems now that the big brains at the War College publicly called them out on it. I was wrong of course, the article bounced around a bit and then promptly got memory-holed, and the Army kept rolling along. Fittingly, the Army Goes Rolling Along is our official song so I should have seen that one coming.
Dr. Scott’s book covers what some call “philosophical anarchy” or “Irish Democracy”, which is not what a typical person might infer from the term anarchy. Anarchy is more commonly associated with violence, chaos, nihilism, punk rock, and the Sex Pistol’s song. Philosophical anarchy in contrast is defined by Oxford as “a branch of political philosophy that is highly skeptical and sometimes even eliminative of the state. At their most ambitious, anarchist theories endorse a comprehensive ideal of social and political (if there should be such a thing at all) life in which the state does not play an essential role” [3]. Although philosophical anarchism does not necessarily imply a desire for the elimination of authority, philosophical anarchists do not believe that they have an obligation or duty to obey authority without first determining that the request is just, moral, and sensical.
Like libertarianism (or any ideology really) anarchism is unsuitable to our human nature at scale even if it has important lessons that we should try and keep in mind. Quite frankly, most of the governing systems we think about are scale-limited as well, it’s why Socialism is perfectly suited (and normal) for most family-sized governing systems but is unable to scale up to larger groups and usually devolves into, well the Socialism that’s been tried in places like Cuba, the USSR, and Venezuela. The “ReAl Socialism has never been attempted” folks tend to miss that part. It has been tried and it works perfectly well, as a matter of fact one could say running a family in a Capitalist manner is downright cruel and immoral (I’m sure some would say the same about American Capitalism too, there are few permanent ideologies in politics).
But I digress, one of the interesting sections Scott called “Fragments” is Fragment 23: What If … ? An Audit Society Fantasy that inspired today’s musings. Scott notes several problems with metrics aka KPI’s that when taken to the extreme absurdity that only warfare seems to inspire is worth a Monday Musing quote.
“The desire for measures of performance that are quantitative, impersonal, and objective was, of course, integral to the management techniques brought from Ford Motor Company to the Pentagon by ‘whiz kid’ Robert McNamara and applied to the war in Indochina. In a war without clearly demarcated battle lines, how could one gauge progress? McNamara told General Westmoreland, ‘General, show me a graph that will tell me whether we are winning or losing in Vietnam.’ The result was at least two graphs: one, the most notorious, was an index of attrition, in which the ‘body counts’ of confirmed enemy personnel killed in action were aggregated. Under enormous pressure to show progress, and knowing that the figures influenced promotions, decorations, and rest-and-recreation decisions, those who did the accounting made sure the body counts swelled. Any ambiguity between civilian and military casualties was elided; virtually all dead bodies became enemy military personnel. Soon, the total of enemy dead exceeded the known combined strength of the so-called Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces troop levels. Yet in the field, the enemy was anything but defeated” [Emphasis Added].
What you measure and incentivize is what your system will tend to produce, for better or for worse. A KPI that most might be familiar with is the Service Level Agreement (SLA) commonly implemented for technical support staff. What can be a helpful measurement of problem resolution times, helpfully escalating more complex issues to management monitoring SLA breaches in order to proactively provide additional support to challenging technical problems can just as easily turn into a zero-defect measurement tool that is used for ranking employee performance. In “audit only mode”, the SLA now becomes a disciplinary tool and one which leads the anarchists in your organization to work around it. Many an IT Helpdesk in my life have had informal work systems where they put all incoming tickets into an “In Progress” status to beat the SLA timer, but don’t actually start working on the problem. Think of the Drive Thru cashier telling you to pull ahead and wait for your food. They are outsmarting the SLA timer even though what the organization wanted to ensure in the first place was food delivery speed. Once you pull forward, they are off the clock and the whole point of even having the KPI is defeated.
As a “systems guy” and a rule follower, anarchy is not naturally appealing to me. I still feel weird whenever I walk on the grass (a military no-no) and seldom cut a sidewalk corner short. My brain works on efficiency, group dynamics, and the like. I have and will continue to “blame the system” even as the dude who designed and built the system itself to those outside the stochastic audience it was designed for. Feel free to call me out on it if you remember this article, I will cop to it, and keep doing it anyway because it works. So it is useful for people like myself to remember anarchy isn’t all bad. For example, while in Ocean Springs I had an amazing Bacon Jam Burger at a place called Knuckleheads and some killer seafood at the Crawfish House (highly recommend both!) because I wanted local anarchistic food right? Who goes on vacation to a beach town in order to eat at McDonalds? But on the drive to and from Ocean Springs I ate at two fast food places because standardized, normalized, and boring food systems save consumers the work of having to research every food option while simultaneously travelling. I know a Taco Bell taco is going to taste the same anywhere I go, thus providing the certainty of mediocre taste and quality which while unremarkable, can be desirable when one is in unfamiliar territory while listening to a book about anarchy. Anarchists alone will never go to the moon or produce silicone memory chips in the bulk we need them. Conversely, systems folks will never invent the iPhone, fight in the French Resistance, start the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Play movement, advocate for traffic circles instead of lights, nor will they paint such an amazing and original mural inside the Ocean Springs Community Center that it becomes a museum and people come from all over the country to see it.
Any and all systems have negative externalities. Those negative externalities can just as easily exceed the benefits the system was supposed to provide. Anarchistic thinking can help bring needed attention to them and help to force changes to the systems we inhabit, even though the anti-group project people will always need the group-project people to build the roads. And leaders need to always keep in mind that the same KPI that you need in order to make decisions, is going to distort the system in some way and create perverse incentives that can easily turn tyrannical, cease to measure the actual business value you intended it to, and can spawn organizational resistance. You still need KPI’s, but they are not a cost-free item.
1. Scott, J.C., Two cheers for anarchism: Six easy pieces on autonomy, dignity, and meaningful work and play. 2012: Princeton University Press.
2. Wong, L. and S.J. Gerras Lying to ourselves: dishonesty in the Army profession. 2015.
3. Sanders, J.T. and J. Narveson, For and Against the State: New Philosophical Readings, in Philosophical Anarchism, A.J. Simmons, Editor. 1996, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD. p. 19 - 39.