Death by KPI
Case No. OCU/26/041
Joint Intelligence Briefing
Victim: The Emotional Organisation
Suspected Cause of Death: Death by KPI
From: Detective Inspector Sarah Whitmore, Organisational Crime Unit, United Kingdom
To: Special Agent Jack Donovan, Organisational Crime Unit, FBI
Subject: Joint Intelligence Briefing: Death by KPI
Jack,
We managed to miss each other in three different time zones.
Apparently, while I was waiting for your call in Manchester, you'd already moved from Chicago to Dallas and were somewhere over Colorado by the time I checked my voicemail.
One advantage of our policing system is that our suspects rarely move several thousand miles overnight.
Still, email has its uses.
We've opened another investigation.
No obvious violence.
No dramatic collapse.
No smoking gun.
Just another organisation that slowly stopped functioning as a healthy place to work.
Initial assessment?
Death by KPI.
Regards,
Sarah Whitmore
Sarah,
Great hearing from you.
And yes, that's on me. Around here the Bureau sends us wherever the case takes us. One week Chicago. Next week Texas. You folks keep policing the same patch for years. It's quaint.
Death by KPI?
Now you've got my attention.
Around here we treat Key Performance Indicators as evidence.
You're telling me they're the victim?
Stay safe.
Jack
Not the victim.
The crime scene.
On paper the organisation was in excellent health.
Targets achieved.
Budgets balanced.
Waiting times reduced.
Every performance dashboard glowed green.
The formal organisation looked fitter than an Olympic athlete.
The emotional organisation had already left the building.
We searched every department.
Trust was last seen about three restructures ago.
Hope disappeared shortly afterwards.
Pride was found barely conscious.
Evidence Log
Exhibit 3: Employee survey. Engagement score remained respectable. Written comments included: "Nothing ever changes."
Exhibit 8: The KPI dashboard was updated every morning. The staff recognition board hadn't been updated for eighteen months.
Exhibit 12: Another transformation programme announced before the previous one had delivered.
Interesting scene.
Now that's interesting.
Everybody's watching the dashboard.
Nobody's watching the people.
Who's your prime suspect?
Leadership?
Middle managers?
Finance?
Consultants?
Around here we'd call that a conspiracy.
You're thinking like an FBI agent.
Always looking for someone to arrest.
Wrong question.
The organisation wasn't murdered.
It was allowed to bleed to death.
Thousands of perfectly reasonable decisions.
Every one individually defensible.
Every one making a tiny withdrawal from the organisation's emotional reserves.
Trust didn't die because of one broken promise.
It leaked away.
Hope wasn't destroyed by one failed change programme.
It was worn down by hearing, year after year, that this time would be different.
Pride simply stopped turning up for work.
Organisations don't usually lie.
They edit.
We interviewed a manager in Boston last year.
He said, "We hit every target and somehow forgot why we came to work."
I wrote it down because it sounded smart.
Now I'm thinking it was evidence.
We've interviewed the witnesses.
Nobody objected to having targets.
People understand targets.
What they couldn't understand was why everything worth measuring wasn't measured.
Nobody asked whether they still trusted senior leaders.
Nobody asked whether they believed the latest transformation would succeed.
Nobody asked whether they still felt proud telling people where they worked.
The organisation measured activity.
It ignored belief.
The paperwork tells you what happened.
The people tell you why.
So KPIs weren't the murder weapon.
They were the fingerprints.
Everybody kept dusting the dashboard while the body was lying on the floor.
I'm definitely stealing that line.
You Americans are always stealing our best ideas.
Just remember to spell "organisation" properly.
The post-mortem is complete.
Cause of death:
The organisation confused performance management with organisational health.
One measures outputs.
The other determines whether those outputs can be sustained.
Different things entirely.
One final intelligence update.
We're expecting another round of budget reductions this side of the pond. Overtime is disappearing and there's talk of losing another detective post.
No doubt someone will report improved efficiency.
We'll file this report under preventable deaths.
Most organisational deaths are.
Funny you should mention budgets.
They're sharpening the pencils over here too. My overtime's under review and one of our analyst posts could disappear before the year's out.
Looks like organisational crime isn't recession-proof.
Keep the intelligence coming.
Different countries.
Different systems.
Same crime.
blairmcpherson.co.uk
