Body Parts 26: Family of the Forest, Brian Chippendale, Bottomless Pit
The potential for Pods, Guilds, and Squads to operate autonomously is a great benefit of heterarchical organizations. But through their relative independence, these working groups risk unintentional misalignments across teams and contextual incoherence within the network.
Distilling labor and outputs into something measurable (e.g. KPIs) can help mitigate these potential issues. Some benefits of supporting teams through metrics:
- helps justify the team's work
- provides insight into where there are opportunities for collaboration or improvement
- enables better communication across contexts
Ultimately, the goal of measuring systems is not to fragment labor into discrete units for efficient production, but to create jumping-off points for contextual discussions that benefit the entire organization.
Risks[edit]
By fixating on metrics and evaluation frameworks, organizations risk over-quantification. Goodhart's Law is an adage that states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For example, if an organization starts targeting X amount of Y within a certain timeframe, labor may be optimized toward reaching X, despite any negative impacts on Y.
This pattern was originally born in a pattern workshop with the Kernel 7 block.
