Colonial India, British problem: Delhi's crawling with venomous cobras. The solution? Pay locals for every dead cobra they bring in. Brilliant, right?

Wrong. Locals started breeding cobras just to kill them and collect bounties. When the British caught on and scrapped the program, the cobra farmers released their now-worthless snakes into the wild.

Result? More cobras than when they started.

This gave birth to the "Cobra Effect" – when incentives designed to solve problems actually make them worse.

👶 We're Still Breeding Cobras

Community Engagement Gone Wrong

Companies measure:

Number of Slack messages sent
Meeting attendance rates
Internal platform interactions

Result? People send meaningless "thanks!" messages, attend pointless meetings, and mindlessly like every company post.

All activity, zero actual engagement.

AI Output Overload

Teams track:

Number of AI queries
Volume of content generated
Speed of output

This leads to 50 AI-generated reports nobody reads and "personalized" emails that feel like spam.

More isn't always better.

🤓 What to Measure Instead

For Community Engagement

Problem-solving speed: How quickly do questions get resolved?
Social and referrals: Are members proud to say they’re a member?
Worker retention: Are engaged employees sticking around?

For AI Productivity

Decision-making speed: Is AI helping people choose faster?
Error reduction: Are processes more accurate?
Time-to-value: How quickly does output create business results?

🧪 The Cobra-Proof Test

Before implementing any metric, ask:

Could someone game this without improving what we actually care about?
Does optimizing for this potentially harm our real goal?
Are we measuring activity or impact?

If you answered "yes" to any of these, you've spotted a cobra. Do better. I know you can!

_ The Bottom Line

The British learned that paying for dead cobras doesn't mean fewer living ones. Let's not repeat their mistake.

Instead of measuring what's easy to count, measure what actually matters. Would you rather have a beautiful dashboard full of meaningless numbers, or actual results that move your business forward?

What metrics have you seen backfire? Drop your cobra stories in the comments!

⭐️ Community Spotlight ⭐️

For the first time, McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research, conducted in partnership with LeanIn.Org, expands beyond North America to include India, Nigeria, and Kenya. Drawing on data from 324 organizations that employ 1.4 million people, McKinsey’s Mayowa Kuyoro, Tracy Nowski, and coauthors uncover persistent gaps in women’s advancement across sectors and regions.

The report explores:

Diverging representation trends across countries
Policies and practices that move the needle on gender equity
Three bottlenecks that organizations can address to accelerate progress

The report emphasizes the need to challenge systemic obstacles hindering women’s advancement, particularly at the first step up to management—a challenge often referred to as the broken rung.

BugHerd is a website feedback and bug tracking tool that makes it easy to collect and manage feedback.

Comments can be pinned to the website while viewing it, making it quick and simple to point out errors and bugs. All tasks move to a Kanban-style board making them easy to track so that nothing is missed.

BugHerd is perfect for website development teams, either agency based or internal teams in companies.

Project Managers and Account Managers
Designers
Web Developers and software teams

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Ads help keep Weekly Workforce running. Please support by checking out this week’s sponsor (clicking them often buys me a coffee) or book in your ad.

📚️ Term of the Week 📚️

Goodhart's Law noun | MANAGEMENT/METRICS TERM

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This principle explains why metrics lose their effectiveness once people start optimizing specifically for them rather than the underlying goal. Named after economist Charles Goodhart, it's the academic cousin of the Cobra Effect - describing how gaming metrics destroys their value as indicators of actual performance or progress.

_{Related terms: Campbell's Law, gaming the system, perverse incentives, metric fixation, measurement distortion}

That’s all for now, pals. See ya next week.

Eryn

🐍 SSsSs I’m a snek

Why cobra metrics are the venom in your business

⚡️ Lightning List ⚡️

🐍 The Cobra Effect 🐍

🐍 The Original Cobra Catastrophe