McNamara fallacy - view on the website
Usually having named something after you is a positive experience, at least for statisticians.
Robert McNamara probably doesn't feel that way. It's not clear if McNamara ever considered himself a statistician, he was part of the 1950's scientific management movement that became the precursor for much of what we see today.
It's a rich and interesting history that takes us from the 1950s to the 21st century. A quote from the Wikipedia page of McNamara tells us about that time. Whilst at Ford:
"McNamara placed a high emphasis on safety: the Lifeguard options package introduced the seat belt (a novelty at the time), padded visor, and dished steering wheel, which helped to prevent the driver from being impaled on the steering column during a collision."
McNamara isn't remembered for this; he's remembered for his failure in the Vietnam War, where 'enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success'. The US continued to succeed at this measure but lost support for the war.
The generalisation of this idea is the McNamara fallacy, which is 'to measure whatever can easily be measured, ignore what's hard to measure, assume what's hard to measure isn't important and that what is hard to measure probably doesn't exist'.
Chris Williamson provides a nice summary where he says:
"...focussing on the most quantifiable measures even if doing so leads from our actual goals. We try to measure what we value but end up valuing what we measure."
There is no more straightforward, more concise and accurate explanation of why your data analytics is worthless than the pursuit of what is easy to measure.
The intellectual fallacy is believing your organisation can continue and be unaffected.
Every corporation that has failed this century isn't due to a lack of data; it's due to too many people following pointless dashboards and vanity metrics. Fifty years after McNamara's failure, there's no excuse for making the same dumb mistakes.
Go ask the executives at Palm how they managed to destroy $50bn of value between 2000 and 2010 when they controlled the market for personal digital assistants—the very thing we now all own and can hardly stop staring at.
How long do you think you can last, valuing what you measure instead of measuring what you value?
Andrew
Want more? Great.
On LinkedIn I describe why this concept is hard to implement.
Here's a short data bite if you want to hear me expand on the idea.
Last week I wrote about the tortoise and the hare.