Measure More than One Thing

We have a lot of easy-to-misuse tools for “optimization”: smart people can find ways to make numbers go up. Unfortunately we often find those ways to maximize some quality by strip-mining away other valuable properties of whatever we’re optimizing. This could be our health, our business, a product, a message, etc.

Measuring a lot of things at once is not a cure for strip-mining, but can act as an early warning that things more difficult to measure are also suffering as we move through a solution space.