Hack:
Raise Your Measurement Chameleon Consciousness

I think a generally underappreciated (even when it's explicitly discussed), but highly influential factor in any workplace is the power of metrics. What makes them so powerful is they act like behavioural beacons - drawing people toward them and shaping their behaviour.

In effect, from a metrics perspective, employees are measurement chameleons.  Whatever numeric objectives decorate their performance backdrop will determine how they spend their energies and devote their attention.

So, as an organization, when we're deciding what is strategically important and what is not, sketching out what organizational results and required behaviours are important should be deliberately discussed and developed into metrics (with open systems to adjust as needed moving forward).

Here duality might be a subject of conversation e.g., profitability and morality, decision speed and decision quality. Three examples:

Ex 1 In some IT environments part of developer performance metrics are response times for bugs. However, in low time high pressure environments, this may (often does) lead to short term fixes...where one bug fix leads to one or more future bugs.

If instead developers as individuals (or teams) are held to measures around the medium term satisfaction (e.g., 3-6 months) of end-users on developed solutions, fixes which create bugs would probably drastically shrink.

Ex 2 CEOs are often held against shareholder value as their determining performance metric. In numerous cases, this has led to both questionable and unquestionably unethical behaviour.

Yet, if morale/environment/social image was a simultaneous performance metric (e.g.,carbon footprint) behaviour would again be adapted in light of that.

The point is not to metricize a list of virtues; it is to strategically select a small balance to represent conditional strategic values (e.g., profitability and social image).

Ex 3 In an organization which sells products or services, the relationship between sales departments and those who implement the solutions can be challenged if sales teams make sales based on promises which are either technically impossible or very difficult. The result is poor customer satisfaction as their expectations aren't met, and poor internal relations.

Instead, if sales bonuses are based on volume metrics and both after-sale customer satisfaction internal implementation team satisfaction (e.g., 1-6 months after, or at multiple intervals ), pitches and deals will now be constructed in light of these.

In summary, when your chameleons change colour, and it's something unwanted - ask yourself...what performance backdrop did you set them against? If you want employees to change what they care about, change what you measure.

Not radically innovative, but perhaps radically practical.