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People manage to survive without planning out the number of breaths they will take every day. A competent engineering team is going to do well even without target lines of code per second goals.

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I would argue that's counter to your intended point though. If you go into the E.R. or the hospital, one of the vitals they measure is in fact the number of breaths taken per unit of time. In a normally functioning human we don't have to worry about that metric because it is self regulating. If on the other hand you are in critical condition, measuring your breaths is a very important metric.

So as I've said elsewhere, the problem isn't measurement. The problem is as Deming said "The aim defines the system". Well thought out measures in accordance with clear goals and aims can be valuable. Like anything though, it requires careful consideration and may need to be revised based on outcomes.

I see a lot of straw man arguments in this thread. There are bad metrics - I think that’s uncontroversial. But you (and others) appear to be making the argument that there are no good metrics - and pointing to bad metrics is irrelevant there.

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