A regional manager’s property teams report twenty-three metrics every week. And none of them predicted the performance problems the regional manager found while walking the site.
Charles Goodhart, studying UK monetary policy in 1975, observed that any statistical regularity collapses once you use it to control behavior. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later sharpened it into a line everyone quotes: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. In multifamily, you watch it happen everywhere. Occupancy gets managed for the report; review scores get gamed for bonuses not real resident satisfaction. You see it with tickets and turns all the time. Measure the speed to close and guess what happens. Tickets get closed in the system while the resident is still waiting.
A meaningful measure does one thing: when it moves the wrong way, someone changes what they do. If the number moves and nobody acts, it’s worthless.
A real measurement culture ties every metric to a decision. What changes in the operation when this moves, and who owns that change? Without that link, the dashboard is just a fun page full of pretty colors. By the way, an expensive pretty page.
Twenty-three metrics, zero predictive power. The team had learned to manage the numbers instead of the operation those numbers were supposed to reflect. Go for fewer measures, more accountability for each.
A measure earns its place only when someone acts the moment it moves. Keep those. Retire the rest. — Mike Brewer
Discussion Prompt: For each metric on your dashboard, can you name the specific decision it triggers when it moves — and what would you cut if you couldn’t name one?