buzz

For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game.

I read the excellent article about Shane Battier titled The No-Stats All-Star and I couldn’t help but consider how the same misguided obsession with easy-to-measure statistics has influenced the design of social networking applications and rendered many of them ineffective.

Is Facebook or Tumblr really more useful when you have more friends?

(via muchonieve via zachklein)

This is the standard incentive system issue. The behavior you want to motivate is rarely easily measured. In team sports they focus on all of these individual stats even though what really matters is how the team performs. The problem is it’s very difficult to quantify the benefit a player provides to a team.

For example, in business, sales would seem to be about as close to an easily quantifiable activity. However, if all of your incentives only focus on the quantifiable ($), then you can motivate other dysfunctional behaviors in the margins. That’s why my understanding is that you need to push other more subtle levers focused on team dynamics to motivate the appropriate behavior.

Source: zachklein