Campbell's law by @meno on 3Speak
Not pointing fingers here, but I do hope this makes us rethink what we've been measuring all long. Cheers MenO --- ▶ Watch on 3speak.tv
Tags: #hive #philosophy #onboarding #community #food4thought
One of my first jobs, real jobs in America was working for a McDonald's. I actually started in the kitchen and eventually became a manager. And although there's a lot of very important lessons that I take from those years, and I look back with some sort of nostalgia at times, there's one in particular that I think it's valuable for the rest of my life, and it's very important to remember. I did not know the name of it back then, but I could clearly identify it, and it's called the Campbell's Law. The idea of Campbell's Law is that whatever it is that you're measuring is what you optimize for, and it dictates the behavior of the people. And if you apply that to anything, really, things start to make sense. For example, if you talk about the welfare state, You talk about benefits for people with, you know, less opportunities. What is it that you are measuring, and what ends up happening? You're measuring that people are not doing good. You're measuring that people are poor. So therefore, people are going to try to present themselves even poorer than they are, so that they get more benefits. Obviously, the intention is good, but what are you really enticing? In the case of McDonald's, we optimized for speed. You have to serve food under a minute 30 or something. So instead of getting better at serving food, maybe getting better at, you know, staffing and peak hours, etc., etc., we just got better at cheating. And that is kind of how it happened. In the case of Hive and why I think this video is valuable, is that plenty of times we talk about onboarding, and the one thing that we measure is how many new accounts we make. We also measure, of course, and not with so much emphasis, I guess, how many counts still remain after X amount of time, et cetera, et cetera. But we hardly ever measure the quality of the experience. We talk about it. I talk about it, too. But we don't really know how to measure that. We don't have a system to follow up to see if people actually enjoy what they are doing, if they enjoy the experience, if they enjoy the community, if they enjoy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I wonder if we've fallen into the same trap, the same thing that we did in McDonald's. We focus so much on numbers, like how many new accounts we can make. because that's easy to measure. And the rest, we hope, it just sorts itself out.