Reviewing for unintended consequences

While KPIs are hard to directly influence, they are easily susceptible to causing unintended consequences and driving the wrong behaviors. Revisiting the health example from earlier in the chapter, there are lots of diets out there that recommend some crazy things, such as never eating fat, or only eating fat, and everything in between. Maybe those diets will temporarily lower your weight on a short-term basis, but doing that also potentially has some unintended consequences on your body. Maybe you are vitamin or mineral deficient as a result. Someone that runs every day to stay in shape can potentially have the unintended consequence of directly causing damage to their knees or back.

The key to KPIs is balance and alignment. You don’t want to over-rotate one part of a system as you will then deplete another part of it. It is incredibly important to review your planned KPIs against those qualities. Failure to do so will end up in KPIs...