“Gaming the numbers” happens when people respond rationally to poorly designed targets, incentives, and performance metrics. These posts explore how fear, quotas, and simplistic scorecards lead people to manipulate data, hide problems, or optimize appearances instead of improving the system.
Drawing on examples from healthcare, government, finance, sports, and everyday work, this archive reflects a core Lean lesson: when metrics are misused, the system teaches people to game the numbers rather than fix the work. Real improvement requires better measures, better leadership, and less blame.
One of the most powerful thoughts in the book On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry (by John Toussaint MD and Roger Gerard PhD) is the quote; “the ultimate arrogance is to change the way…
A Vivid Example of Gaming the Numbers on “The Office” NBC’s “The Office” is often a good source for clips that illustrate the opposite of Lean thinking. Last week’s episode continued the subplot where the new CEO assigned Andy, the…
This article caught my eye recently: “Canada leads in surgical mishaps.” By “leads,” the article means they have a high number of mishaps (which is really more of a trailing position, not a leading one). I’m not here to quibble…
On his blog, John Toussaint shared this letter from ThedaCare CEO Dean Gruner to all employees. Toussaint said the letter is inspired by Paul O’Neill and his thoughts on patient safety (you can hear my podcast with O’Neill here, as…
Today, I’m sharing a brilliant Slate.com interview: “Risky Business: James Bagian “NASA astronaut turned patient safety expert” on Being Wrong.” He’s actually also an engineer and an anesthesiologist. An impressive background and impressive thinking. I will share a few highlights…
As you might have heard, considering all of the Super Bowl media hype from here in North Texas, our weather has been pretty bad. Between different ice storms, we’ve been “snowed in” four separate days in the last two weeks,…
There was a really good discussion and story on the ESPN program “Sunday NFL Countdown” today about individual player incentive payments — why are they necessary to motivate players and how do they distort the game in the last week…
Here’s a hilarious, yet somewhat sad, story that will instantly resonate with students of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. From Poland — police officers in the town of Bialogard were given a strict quota of writing one ticket per day, or…
TL;DR: Data is what gets recorded. Facts are what’s actually happening. Confusing the two is how leaders get fooled by faked reports, broken sensors, and decorated dashboards. Deming and Ohno both warned about this in different ways. The fix is…
A few random thoughts from being on the couch all day Sunday, catching up on work and watching a bit of NFL football. One, a thought about Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and the “PDCA” cycle, the other about a pizza…
We had some local Boston news about hospitals reducing infection rates, including dangerous blood stream infections that result from central lines. Several academic medical centers in Boston said the number of ICU patients contracting bloodstream infections had dropped by at…
To Outfox the Chicken Tax, Ford Strips Its Own Vans – WSJ.com If people and organizations are good at anything, it’s gaming a system or finding workarounds. From a recent WSJ article comes a tale of how Ford works around…
