Post by @mhoye@cosocial.ca

"The steering wheel is the one component nobody has bothered to instrument."

One of the things I miss the most about working with the Flow team - apart from being @grimalkina -adjacent for almost a whole year, that part was amazing - was the part where the Flow product I was working on, ostensibly an engineering process metrics tool, was secretly a way that you could gauge, backed with data, how effective your managers and leaders are.

And: let me tell you.

https://www.productionalchemist.com/p/inever-seen-a-game-fail-because-artists-too-slow

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mhoye but seasonally spooky

@mhoye@cosocial.ca 5 hr. ago

We would give demos of this product, just turn it on to give prospective clients a data-backed view of how their organization worked, and about half the time it was like turning the lights on the morning after a party. Like there's someone's dog in the punch bowl, three dudes have passed out in the bathroom and does anyone know who they are, why is the couch on the balcony how did that even get there kind of party.

"We thought we were all just having a good time... what the hell happened here?"

mhoye but seasonally spooky

@mhoye@cosocial.ca 5 hr. ago

I miss working with that team, on that product, was because fundamentally that product proved that if you can define and instrument success, then you can treat process improvement like code - make a change, measure it, roll it back if it doesn't deliver or comes at the cost of something else you value - and once you can do that, you can expect, and hold management accountable, for their effectiveness at doing just that.

And my goodness was that ever unacceptable to a certain sort of leader.

mhoye but seasonally spooky

@mhoye@cosocial.ca 5 hr. ago

It was certainly an irony that the company leadership never found the courage to start using that tool internally. In the year I was there, despite the Flow team prospering the rest of the org sort of fell apart; I can't honestly say I know for sure what the right number of CEOs for a company to have in one year is, but I'm confident that five is too many.

But the proof point was there, the idea is sound. Measuring individual employee productivity is a dead end. You need to measure the system.

mhoye but seasonally spooky

@mhoye@cosocial.ca 5 hr. ago

And, let me show you something else @grimalkina introduced me to, a genuinely terrifying thing called Simpson's Paradox.

If you're measuring individual performance and then aggregating that data into a single number, without understanding scope and context - and making decisions based on that number - this is the name of the gun you've pointed at the foot of your company.

"Give me one number" is the tell. That is always the tell.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/10/09/measuring-up/

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00513/full

A graphed example of Simpson's Paradox, showing that "Despite the fact that there exists a negative relationship between dosage and recovery in both males and females, when grouped together, there exists a positive relationship. All figures created using ggplot2 (Wickham, 2009). Data in arbitrary units."

Frontiers

Frontiers | Simpson's paradox in psychological science: a practical guide

The direction of an association at the population-level may be reversed within the subgroups comprising that population—a striking observation called Simpson...

Measuring Up | blarg

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mhoye but seasonally spooky

@mhoye@cosocial.ca 4 hr. ago

Extraordinary claims, the argument goes, require extraordinary evidence. And in the context of an organization's effectiveness, fundamentally the claim leadership is making is "you should be where you in the orgchart, making the money you're making, because you're effective in that role".

And the higher you get on any orgchart, the more extraordinary that claim becomes. So we should be ... curious, when the burden of proof is pushed to the people lowest on that orgchart, with the least power.