Making decisions based solely on quantitative observations, ignoring qualitative factors.
Yankelovich's 1971 critique of metric fixation, named for McNamara's use of body counts in Vietnam rather than authored by him. The sequence is instructive: measure what can be measured, disregard what cannot, presume what cannot be measured is unimportant, then that it does not exist.
In practice
- A programme measured on units delivered reports success while the thing it was built to change is unchanged.
- A school judged solely on examination results has no way to record the two years of behaviour work that made the results possible.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors