Goodhart's Law

Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The moment you reward a number, people optimise the number rather than the outcome it was meant to represent, and the two quietly come apart.

In growth this is everywhere. Reward sales-qualified leads and your team logs more leads of worse quality. Reward calls booked and you get booked calls that never show. Reward activation defined as a shallow click and you hit the target while real value stalls. The metric goes up and to the right while the business it was supposed to track does not move.

The defence is not to abandon metrics but to pick ones that are hard to game and to pair every target with a guardrail. Watch a leading metric alongside the lagging outcome it should produce, and when they diverge, trust the outcome. Goodhart's Law is the reason a north-star metric must measure delivered value, not vanity activity.