The “spreadsheet mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs

Metrics-driven organization (aka KPIs or what the author calls Spreadsheet mentality) is what I do for a living: I’ve seen companies die by it, and companies succeed thanks to it. It’s meant to do one thing: clarify everyone’s role in a large, confusing, often political organization where success wouldn't otherwise be clear. If that’s not a large, systemic issue that even the best would-be cult leader among your CxOs can’t address, you need to have KPIs for things to be clear (on top of the best would-be cult leader among your CxOs to sell the idea, the hard choices in there and the vision unpinning it).

Imagine you work for the customers' support team: you unblock the client, the client is happy, and you also fix the public doc to unblock anyone after you… That’s all great. But at large organizations (namely: Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) people ask: should we have a CS team at all? Isn’t that objective unscalable and trying to satisfy people a feature we shouldn’t have because every solution should be a product, not a process?

Unless you are working at companies where that question is legitimate, you don’t need KPIs formalized into a tree structure: you need objectives, clear goals, praises for unexpected great work, and support to make sure that people who are asked to do things can. The MECE tree is useful if you don’t want to miss something. For smaller structures, the gaps are a feature: you can’t do it all.

Bad metrics can wreck corporate cultures. Let’s attack the other straw man: metric-free orgs.

Symptoms:

- Resources (and credit and promotions) are given to the most articulate and outgoing rather than the most effective. (Marketing budget goes to the extrovert rather than the manager producing the best ROI)

- When dates slip, they slip a lot. The night before a release it’s announced that there will be a 3 month delay. (Bad for anyone having to explain “If it’s 3 months, why couldn’t you tell me that sooner?” to a customer)

- Unanticipated earnings and revenue misses. (Same issue as above, but bad to anyone talking to investors)

- Poor prioritization. Effort is spent on squeaky wheels versus high value problems. (Engineers spend time helping “that nice person in accounting” versus solving a customer problem that brings in hard money)

With all the things an exec needs to worry about, they can’t effectively operate without good data to drive decisions. Data needs to have human interpretation as well. Of course bad data can be worse than no data, but that’s another story.

> The Spreadsheet Mentality comes from the age-old executive wisdom of “Only what’s measured is what matters.” As a result of that wisdom, the underlying assumption becomes: “If it can be tracked, it’s important. If it can’t be tracked, it’s less important.”

A better formulation, that more accurately describes what happens, is: if you can't track what's important, you think that what you can track is important. This leads to total catastrophes (such as, for instance, the beginning of the Vietnam war where the number of enemy deaths became the measure of success).

"What can be tracked" doesn't matter; what matters is what matters. If that can't be tracked, well then we need to find a way to track it. It can be hard, but it's almost always possible.

I am a very organized individual – as a freelancer I have to be. But I have yet to meet any organization where I don't feel they are an unorganized mess. Naturally communications get more complicated when there are more people, sure. But I also worked on film sets where teams of people who got to know each other a week ago work with military discipline towards a common goal, with a clear team structure and efficient communications. So: individuals can be well organized. Small teams can be well organized. But what about bigger structures?

I think in bigger organizations organization increasingly becomes an issue of aligning the incentives of all people involved. If you are the spreadsheet person in such a corporation and your higher ups have you incentiviced to cover your ass and follow a fixed and unchanging bureaucratic process, you will not want to adjust to changing requirements. If the make up artist on a film set treated what should be a short brush up between two pictures the same as this, the whole production would grind to a halt, because everybody waits for the make up artist. The issue with the spreadsheet person is that their higher ups typically also care more about the numbers than the actual thing/project being done.

If getting the numbers, reports, sheets whatever becomes more important than doing the actual thing in a good way, your organization is in trouble. That does not mean those numbers, reports, sheets are not important. But they serve a function for the project, they are not the goal of the project. If they are thegoal of the project, you are doing it wrong.

>> You can probably figure this out on your own, but I’ll walk you through it a little bit. In simplest terms, The Spreadsheet Mentality comes from the age-old executive wisdom of “Only what’s measured is what matters.” As a result of that wisdom, the underlying assumption becomes: “If it can be tracked, it’s important. If it can’t be tracked, it’s less important.”

That part of the article is just wrong. It is not wisdom that is described here, but a mentality. And yes, that mentality does exists, and that is the "Spreadsheet Mentality". There is a German saying, "wer viel mißt, mißt Mist" (rough translation: whom measures a lot measures shit. Well, same mentality, but it only means that:

- you don't know how data can be used - you don't know how metrics work - you don't know what to measure

But that is only my opinion of course.

"Only what’s measured is what matters" is much more sweeping than what I've usually heard, which is, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

I understand that managers may conflate the two.

What really sticks in my craw about this mindset is that it's lowest-common denominator management. The spoken implication of metrics-driven management is to keep the organization focused on KPIs, but the unspoken implication is that employees can't be trusted. That is probably true for many employees, but not all. This lack of trust between management and employees is a big red flag for me, bigger than the hassle of micromanagement.

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is a quote by W. E. Deming. But Deming was fully aware that there are things you can't measure and must manage. He also emphasized that data could be used to mislead and that you must... well, use your brain. Deming thought of data as merely something to be collected in order to decide on an action, but before you can decide, you predict. I think this "predictive" potential is a good mental model; just as predicting the future is foolish, you can also reliably predict that the Earth will go around the Sun tomorrow.

Deming was (among many things) a professor of statistics, and knew that statistics can lie. Much of his work emphasizes the need for analytical skills and critical thinking. An example is PDSA (not PDCA), which requires study and evaluation of an action and theory in order to learn from it. https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/

Numbers are comforting because they are "objective".

Take the law; if you drive on a nice day on an empty new highway doing 5-10 mph or Km/h over the limit and there's a speed trap, you get a pic of your car with a nice timestamp and speed and you get a ticket. You drive on a rainy day with traffic and make a couple tight passes, it would be up to a cop's judgement to ticket you for reckless driving, and it's subject to interpretation, even if the first case is "safe" and the second way less. Lots of examples with other figures that are encoded in law.

For people working in teams (thinking software teams for ex), I've been asked in interviews several times "how do you measure the team's success" or variants ("productivity" etc) and my canonical answer now is: a) metrics and numbers are OK to look at but can be deceiving, can be gamed and still need interpretation. Ultimately I look at b) are the objectives being fulfilled? (are we doing the work?) – which it's also kind of subjective because we can establish ambitious goals or sandbag – and c) are people happy?, basically asking them.

Related: the "McNamara Fallacy" [1] discussed on HN with 200+ comments [2]

[1] http://mcnamarafallacy.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166488

Same goes for presentations.

All meetings I have been in for the last 15 - 20 years starts with "This is a high-level view". Which means "I am to lazy to analyze details". Spreadsheets and presentations feed in into this.

When I start showing details, people "turn off", no wonder many projects fail. When I started out in IT, almost all meetings were to examine details and people would work to tweak the resolution to make it better.

Spreadsheets like 123 started becoming mainstream in the late 80s, then slow slide to "High Level" started. Then the trend greatly accelerated when presentation software became mainstream. Before that, it was easier to talk details then to create a slide deck for an overhead viewer.

> HR cannot be the only shepherds of “the people track,” or else it will just get ignored.

Herein lies the fundamental crux. The CISO cannot be the only shepherd of security, or else security will just get ignored. QA, Product, UX, Finance, Legal, cannot be the only shepherds of their domains, or else they will just get ignored.

The fact is that you will not find perfect candidates, where "perfect" means "well-versed in every corporate sub-field." That's not reasonable. What you can do is hire people with the humility to a) understand what they are not good at, b) actively invite the participation of those who are good at it, c) value, utilize, and celebrate their contributions. That's not an HR skill, that's a soft skill.

I think there is a distinction between "what I can't measure" and "what I am too lazy to measure." If something has a meaningful effect, that effect and thus the underlying factor must be measurable. Yeah there isn't some simple equation to turn "Bob tells lots of funny jokes" into a "team morale boost quotient" but it is still observable that on days when Bob's in the office everyone is more productive and there are fewer issues associated with low morale. But rather than starting with the things that are important - sales, productivity, complaints, etc - and determining what actually affects them, instead bad managers start with the measurements and see what affects they have on things that are important and assume that's all there is.

As Dilbert says: "Our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late."

I feel like this article, and the discussion here, is conflating two different ideas.

- If I measure what I do, that helps me know I'm actually accomplishing what I hope to accomplish.

- If someone higher up in the organisation reads the measurements I have produced for myself, they get confused at best. In practise, the effect is often that they are actively mislead by the numbers.

The difference is local context. It's easy to improve work by measurement if you're close to the work and understand all the nuances of it.

Constructing measurements that can convey all the necessary context easily takes more time than just doing the job, sometimes multiples of it. (As can be seen by the proportionally growing body of administrators in any reasonably large corporation.)

This goes back to Deming, of course. The more fundamental difference is the presence of theory. Theory is what you get when you combine measurements with an appropriate mental model of the situation -- something front-line workers can do, but executives do not have the necessary experience for.

Numbers in the absence of theory (what executives have) are worse than useless: they're like driving on the highway by looking at the centre line in the rear view mirror. Numbers in the presence of theory (what front-line workers have) is the backbone of any good operation.

Something not directly mentioned in the article is how every layoff will create a huge social network of people who can refer you to their new employer.

Just about every person who got laid off will find another job of some kind, and if they liked working with you, they'll help get you in and give you a leg up compared to other candidates.

Referrals are the top source for new hires: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...

Perhaps the criticism I'd give to the article is that many of the things that "can't be put on a spreadsheet" actually can be put on a spreadsheet. A lot of employee feelings can be gathered from surveys and put into spreadsheets or metrics.

I don't really think that this "spreadsheet mentality" is necessarily doing what the author is accusing it of doing.

For a lot of businesses, the reality may be that having the most innovative, most happy workforce doesn't do enough to affect the one spreadsheet that matters, which is the balance sheet.

Let's say I laid off 100 people out of my 1000 person workforce. The median salary is $100,000. So, I just saved $10 million in payroll. Maybe those 100 people attract another 100 people to defect to other companies, which might be a good thing, since those are going to be my most disgruntled 100 employees no longer poisoning the well.

So now I've got to go out and hire some new people. These new people won't have any negative history or built-up animosity with my company.

This process might have some turmoil, but I've still saved $10 million in payroll, so my costs I've incurred to do some re-hiring and to account for my potentially slowed down pace of innovation have to exceed $10 million for this to be a bad deal.

I can even lose some customer revenue and come out ahead. Have you ever dropped a vendor solely because they had a layoff?

If my little made-up story is anywhere close to the truth, it probably shows you why we have the current work culture where employees basically need to switch jobs within 5 years to stay happy and well-compensated.

A lot of people are talking about the problem being that the people measure the wrong things, which I think is fair, but from my perspective sort of misses the point?

I would recommend anyone who hasn't to give a read through "Seeing Like a State "[0].

You have to be incredibly careful when measuring things, it's tremendously easy for your measure to end up being a target in a way that gives you bad outcomes.

Doubly so if you are measuring something as part of a large organisation which may take your measurements as input to some process without any awareness of caveats they may have, or assumptions they were made under. Congratulations, you may now have a feedback loop.

Triply so if someone stands to benefit from your measurement, who will then have an incentive to distort the measure.

This isn't to say measurements aren't tremendously valuable or useful, they're a tool like any other.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

In terms of getting promotions, anything that can't be measured doesn't matter.

Bring a nice, good person ain't gonna get you a payrises.

The sweet inferno of following a process that will take you from one wiki page to the next, then coming back, with no clear checklist of completeness and no chance for you to validate ; rampant aconymisms with no explanations that assume global understanding of all the particularities of obscure systems as if you built them, and assume knowledge of poorly defined organizations and processes with unclear responsibilities. Any way to get help is hidden as deep as possible behind tickets that will never get processed and distribution lists that redirect you to channels where people just send you to the unfathomably bad doc you where following or redirect you to ticketing systems again.

Onboarding to an organization takes you through four different systems you need to onboard without explaining the order, require prior entry creation in another system that isn't documented or explained until, eventually, you fail and have to start the process again. It requires you to provide ids you can't figure whence to pull from. Onboarding to another system requires translation in a JSON file, but then asks to manually re-enter the same data in another web-app by manually pulling it out from JSON file. 4 entries × 37 different languages, with no way of automation. Onboarding to system A takes 8 weeks. Onboarding to process B takes 8 weeks from the PO approval. You need an IO number before you can start the process, then you need to figure how to author in the format they expect (they tell you the format but not how to author it). Then they'll ask questions that you, very honestly, need to be a lawyer to answer. You'll ask the lawyer, who's out of office and whose responder tells you to chat to A FUCKING BOT whose job is redirect you to incomplete documentation, which won't be able to answer your specific question anyhow. Might as well redirect you to a university's home page for you to start your own lawyer degree at this stage. If you miss a checkbox, you start anew and it's 8 weeks. Then you finally get the greenlight and want to toggle the feature flag on. It must be done progressively, in increasing %, environment by environment, with approval from some random team you don't need at each step. Your feature is separate and will target only 3 of your customers? Doesn't matter, have to follow the same process.

People who are supposed to help you are either too busy dealing with their own administrative nightmares, too bad or lazy to do so, or already burnt out and will let you do the effort. They'll be here to tell you you fucked up don't worry.

You keep getting automated alerts from 5 different systems (I'm not even exaggerating), for systems that more often than not don't belong to you. It takes an average 1 to 2 hours to understand these tickets, then you enter the binary tree of 1) finding the rightful owner, make them accept it's theirs, and once in a while even manage to get the thing reassign if such a process was ever considered in the first place 2) or realizing it is correct, and trying to figure what needs to be done through documentation that are as bad as can be, prioritize it (kidding, it's always top priority and needs to be done yesterday), and figure how to mark the thing as complete to get closure 3) find out that the alert is wrong or unjustified and start fighting the administration again to provide evidence, justification, gather the right approvals on form 22A from your skip-skip-skip-skip-skip-skip level manager, get it certified by the office of cries and complaints, which finally opens the door of the office of furniture and casual offerings on floor -12b, where you'll need to sacrifice a goat under moonshine while standing on your left arm. I spent 3 weeks telling a security "expert" that the alert asking me to add flags to gcc was a false positive, considering that our project is in .net.

Information comes from 4 different media (mail, chat, some random announcement website, and un-recorded meetings), and it is assumed you saw, know and will abide to the new policy change as soon as generic communication has been dropped in the sea of information.

Meanwhile you're still expected to do your job, except that your perception of said job is very different from what the organization is expecting from you. I just got escalated to my partner because I did not fill in the proper tracking fields in a ticket. Except I did. But I dared answer that person directly in the comment she left me within the ticket, while she was expecting me to come to an "office hours" meeting to tell her about this (it's more convenient to have all the people you expect stuff from in a room at once rather than having to deal with individuals, right?). So she didn't see it, and assumed I didn't do it. Disregard that half of these fields are irrelevant to our cases because we don't work on the codebase they're supposed to be tracking. People whose job description it is to help you will still not, because they found a loop-hole in an organization that doesn't make any sense, and no matter how much effort I'll spend trying to fix that will ever land.

Then there's this random dying system that everyone hates maintaining because it's so old it keeps triggering deprecation alerts, security alerts and so on. Every change is a refactoring and migration project. It's yours now, we decided. Code has been written by 16 different people who moved on to greener fields, nothing makes sense, 80% of code is deprecated but you don't dare deleting it because coverage is so low, and build somehow fails when you remove it. It would only take a month or two to go through the code base and make it sane, but you get denied that "budget" because it doesn't match any of the "OKRs" which solely focus on acquiring more and more paying users. The thing is used by a handful of people, and when ultimately, after months of moaning, you manage to get approval to deprecate the whole thing, then zombies get out of their graves and start trying to tank the project on the hotel that they wrote a line of code in it in 1997, and they'll see to it that this shining marvel of engineering will outlive them.

Death by thousand administrative cuts.

What makes me dream? Unity. Complete docs that tell you in one go what you need to do. A single alerting system. Empathy, people who actually listen to you and try to help. Processes that allow the individual to decide whether that applies to them, accountability if you fuck up.

The "spreadsheet mentality" is ignorant of the reality and values of intangibles.

The prime example is bringing the global team together once per year for team meetings and partying together. Such an initiative is priceless, as everyone knows who has ever witnessed one such event. People still talk about such events a decade later, but the accountants see them as waste and cut them.

In fact, giving accountants and lawyers too much power in an organization compared to engineers is one of the major mistakes that leads to the "spreadsheet mentality": as they are non-technical, and many general managers might be, too, organizations tend to not trust their own judgment, so they start bringing in external consultants. Guess what, cutting spending that leads to intangible benefits is the first thing they do, calling it "low hanging fruit" of the "transformation".

I for one love spreadsheets. Everything is a spreadsheet Everything is a list.

My life is so much better when structured. And clearly so are all my professional endavours.

We might ask what is the opposite of spreadsheet mentality, because while tracking data is important so is acting on difficult-to-explain intuition.

The article has a point, of course...

Before clicking on the link, i thought it'd be about "putting everything into an Excel spreadsheet" mentality, no matter how insane, redundant and inefficient is..

Ugh, how i hate receiving screenshots in Excel/Word/whathaveyou... and don't even get me started on stale information in multi-megabyte Excel files on some corporate network share...

Everything can be measured, you just need to try harder to measure it. And make more spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are awesome. The problem is never "too many spreadsheets" the problem is always "not enough spreadsheets" and "spreadsheets not good enough".

I think the author should read Hubbard's How to Measure Anything. It's about measuring things usually deemed "intangible" and thus "unmeasurable".

Not a panacea, but I think he would either weaken his claim or strengthen his argumentation after reading it.

I just realized that if you have js disabled Medium does the worst thing - it loads about a tweet worth of the article and all the side advertising but gives no indication that there is more article.

Text takes nearly no bandwidth - why would you ever do this.

Pro tip: when scanning an article quickly to see if it's worth a deeper read or just corporate BS, look for these words and phrases.

align

organizational change

strategy

drive (other than as applied to cars)

hit the ground running

P(corporate BS) goes up by 0.10 for each of those you see.

related: Goodhart's law

Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Like other posters have said, metrics are useful and convenient, but they are NOT the focus of the business. The business defines goals, defines measures to help support the goals, and re-evaluates as needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

This reminds me of the ongoing push to eliminate testing in school, based on the belief that one can master a subject while being unable to answer questions about it.

Efficacy is not the word that should go in that spot. I don't know what should, but a job is not something that has efficacy.

ITT: how poor incentive design and Taylorism can team up to wreck any organization. :P

It's never going away.

The thing to understand about corporate capitalism is that executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The bosses want brag points so they can justify promotions, and that's all they care about. Subjective achievements don't matter, from this perspective. The health of the company certainly doesn't matter. Being able to say they grew a team from 40 to 150 people... and then being able to say they "saved $10 million per year" when they cut all those people... those "achievements" burnish their resumes and, therefore, matter.

There's also an element of toxic masculinity in play here. No, I am not saying that all masculinity is toxic (it's not, not at all) and I am certainly not saying men or maleness are toxic (I'm a man, and most people would read me as masculine). But you cannot understand corporate America if you don't understand the toxic masculinity on which it is based. Here it pertains to the division of labor between "male work" and "female work". The nice-to-haves and the subjective improvements are female work; the ugly work (usually, ugly because it hurts other people, as if "making tough decisions" were as onerous as being on the receiving end thereof) that actually drives a P&L is male work. (Does this distinction of labor as male or female map in any intrinsic way to the biological sexes, as opposed to the social construct of gender? I highly doubt it.) What we see in companies is that the work regarded as "male" grabs all the glory and accrues power; the work that can be construed of as the objective domination of others for the company's direct benefit is what gets rewarded and will, in time, be the only work that matters. The nice-to-haves don't; their contribution to the health of the company (or to the health of society, about which executives care even less) is too diffuse to be considered real.

I would have expected Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) to have been mentioned here.

For me the classic example was when all the doctors in the UK stopped letting people make appointments on any future date because they were being judged on how long patients have to wait for an appointment. So instead people had to repeatedly phone up first thing every morning. The war criminal Blair's government was very good at that sort of crap.