You get what you measure.
If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”
Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”
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“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
—John Lennon paraphrasing others in his song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
I don't remember where I first heard this. It may have been spoken in a conversation about road rage. I think there's something very true about it, though, and it speaks to much more than driving.
When someone is unkind to you, they're probably not reacting to you. They're probably reacting to the last person who upset them.
In other words, when one is unkind or behaves strangely toward you, especially when there is no obvious explanation for their behavior, their annoyance may be misdirected. They may be treating you the way they wish they had treated someone else, someone who came before you. It's not fair, but that's life.
Apparently, psychologists call it displacement.
The new Ghost album, Skeletá, is pretty good, even if it's not my favorite of theirs. Meliora may be at the top, and I definitely think it's their most even and refined. The lyrics on Skeletá can occasionally be cringey, not unlike Impera, but like all Ghost albums, there are some hits, and they're not all singles.
The rock ballad Guiding Lights may be my favorite song on the new album. It sounds like something that belongs on a film's soundtrack. It also contains what I consider to be genuinely useful insight. I'm a bit embarrassed to quote Ghost on philosophical matters, but as Seneca said, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” (Not that Tobias is a bad author. He's just not who most people think of when they think of philosophy.)
Anyway, the line is:
The road to nowhere is long.
In other words, if you find yourself stuck, you may be on the wrong path, and continuing down it may never prove that to you. In fact, the belief that the reward is “just a little ways ahead” is a pretty good indication that you'll never reach it, especially if you've found yourself believing that more than once. Although it can be painful, in circumstances like these, you would be better off turning around and trying something else. You might even find that another approach gets you to your destination much faster than anticipated.
“People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole!”
—Theodore Levitt
I read this today in the 2013 edition of The Design of Everyday Things, and oh goodness, is it true. For the vast majority of people, software is a means to an end. How easily we geeks forget that. The world is not like us.
My mother doesn't want to use Facebook. She wants to connect with relatives. She certainly doesn't want to remember her password, complete multi-factor authentication challenges, create a profile, change her settings, add people as friends, upload images, check her notifications… She wants to connect with relatives. What we techy types call “fun,” what we enjoy perfecting and tinkering with, my mom calls “garbage that gets in the way of what I actually want to do.”
No one wants to use your software. Well, no one but the geeks like us, and even we don't want to tinker with everything. Most people most of the time just want to get things done.
How different would software look if we remembered that?
On the password front, I'm certainly not suggesting we sacrifice digital security for user experience—being hacked isn't a great experience, anyway—but let's use something better, like passkeys. They're just as secure, if not more secure, and they're practically invisible. People hardly even notice themselves using them. That's a good thing.
“Irritability is not bad temper. Nor is bad temper irritability. Bad temper carries the heart into it. The bad tempered man really does delight to vex and torture. Irritability flames and is gone. But both ruin happiness.”
—Charles Buxton in Notes of Thought