The Field Guide › Paper
Ridgway's two-page paper is the origin of the measurement-dysfunction argument and the classical ancestor of everything the corpus says about metrics gone wrong. Writing at the dawn of management science, Ridgway observes that once a quantitative measure of performance is installed, people reorganise their behaviour around the measure rather than around the underlying purpose it was meant to track, and that this happens across three cases. A single performance measure produces tunnel vision, with effort flowing to whatever is counted while everything uncounted is neglected (the classic case of a plant maximising the one figure it is judged on at the expense of quality, maintenance or morale). Multiple measures reproduce the problem and add conflict between them, so that people optimise the easy or the rewarded number and trade off the rest. And composite measures, which try to solve this by rolling everything into a single weighted index, merely bury the arbitrary judgements about what matters inside a figure that then looks objective. The essay is short, has no data, and predates the vocabulary that later attached to the same phenomenon (Goodhart's law, Campbell's law, the cobra effect, gaming, surrogation), but it states the mechanism cleanly and first: measurement is not a neutral readout of performance but an intervention that changes the thing it measures. For a corpus that treats the measurement of psychological safety with suspicion, Ridgway is the foundational citation beneath the streetlight-effect and beyond-metrics arguments, the reminder that the problem with measuring a construct like safety is not merely technical imprecision but the behavioural distortion that installing any metric sets off. Its limits are those of its era and length: it argues by illustration rather than evidence, drawn from mid-century industrial and clerical settings, and it names the disease without offering much of a cure beyond caution. (Text drawn from the 1956 Administrative Science Quarterly paper, 1(2), pp. 240-247.)