Goodhart's law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, if you pick a measure to assess performance, people find a way to game it.

To illustrate, I like the (probably apocryphal) story of a nail factory that sets "Number of nails produced" as their measure of productivity and the workers figure out they can make tons of tiny nails to hit the target easily. Yet, when the frustrated managers switch the assessment to "weight of nails made", the workers again outfox them by making a few giant heavy nails.

And there's the story of trying to measure fitness by steps from a pedometer only to find the pedometer gets attached to the dog.

Some strategies for helping this are to try and find better, harder-to-game measures, assess with multiple measures, or allow a little discretion. More detail in this nice little article.

I also liked an idea I read in Measure What Matters of pairing a quantity measure with a quality measure, for example, assessing both the number of nails and customer satisfaction of the nails.

I revised the illustration. Here is the original

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

There are just two countries that are double-landlocked: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. Their unusual claim to fame is that not only are they landlocked with no access to the high seas themselves, but they are also surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked.

Another way to put it is that you have to cross two national boundaries before you can reach water connected to the oceans.

Growing up on the island of Great Britain I somewhat took for granted that with a few hours in most directions and I’d be looking out onto the sea. But that’s not at all the case if you were born in a landlocked country.

Double-landlocked countries

What’s the difference? OK, this is not rocket science, but I remember growing up it took me a while to not be calling them interchangeably. There are so many neat hybrid ways to get on the water now that nothing is cut and dry, but if they look like what’s in the picture then you can be pretty confident you’ll be getting it right.

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Kayak vs Canoe