The Risk Read
Name the risk your metric invites
Describe a metric or KPI you use, or are considering, and receive a plain-language read of the behavioral risk it invites. The read is free and specific to what you enter. It names the risk. It does not prescribe the fix, because designing the fix responsibly means looking at your actual system. This is the lens behind the Forward Intrinsic diagnostic, applied to one metric you bring, not the diagnostic itself.
Enter a metric
This tool needs JavaScript, and returns its read when the site is served online.
Reading the risk
Where the design begins
The read stopped at the tension. Resolving it is the conversation.
The read named the risk and left it there on purpose. Turning that tension into an actual measurement and incentive design is the work of a conversation, where the real system is on the table. Bring the metric you just entered. It comes with you.
Not ready to book?
Leave your details and the metric goes to Jonathan with them. He will follow up.
Thank you. The metric and your details are on their way to Jonathan.
The Thinking Behind This
A lens, not a lookup
This read is not improvising. It reasons from a strongly-supported body of work on how measurement and incentives shape behavior: Charles Goodhart and Donald Campbell on measures that corrode once they become targets, Steven Kerr on the folly of rewarding one behavior while hoping for another, Choi, Hecht, and Tayler on surrogation, which is mistaking the measure for the goal it was meant to serve, Robert Austin and W. Edwards Deming on the dysfunction of managing a system by the few things that are easy to count, and the behavioral research on how extrinsic rewards can crowd out the motivation they were meant to strengthen.
The tool applies that lens to a single metric you describe. The full diagnostic applies it to an entire organization, with access to the system the metric actually lives in. This is a demonstration of how the work thinks, not a substitute for it.
One thing worth being precise about: a metric’s risk is not really a property of the metric. The same measure can sit inert in one organization and turn corrosive in another, depending on the consequence, authority, and workload arranged around it. What this read gives you is the risk a metric is prone to, the failure modes it is built to invite. Whether those risks are live in your organization, and what they cost when they fire, is decided by the system the metric sits inside. That is the part that does not fit in a text box, and it is what the diagnostic is for.
Begin
Schedule a Conversation
A 45-minute conversation. No pitch deck.
The calendar opens in a quick overlay, so you stay right here. Nothing loads from the scheduler until you open it.
Prefer email? Write to Jonathan@ForwardIntrinsic.com or call (949) 736-1979.