Social scientists have repeatedly warned that when a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good measure because people alter their behaviour to score well on the indicator itself.

In practice, “over‑optimising” to a KPI nudges people to game the numbers or incentivises the wrong behaviours. Workers take shortcuts or work too much rather than improve the actual outcome of that work.

Organisations see the same pattern on a broader scale: counting outputs and chasing quotas can depress quality, long‑term value and collaboration.

This is especially true when automation takes over routine tasks and human contributions shift toward creativity, problem‑solving and long-term value creation – things that are hard to reduce to a single metric.

Conversely, when performance metrics lack clarity, supervisors’ subjective opinions tend to substitute for actual data.

Yet many workplaces still default to old metrics simply because they are familiar, quantifiable and embedded. The irony is striking: organisations have more employee information than ever before, yet many performance systems still rely on out-of-date snapshots and reductive metrics.

As one expert notes, complex performance realities are often oversimplified into frameworks that “manufacture” quantitative data to create the illusion of objectivity.