Achievement is hitting the mark, which requires us to incrementally measure and adjust.
Soon, we are successful: we have reached and superseded the goal.
We have become excellent at increasing the measurement and manipulating the scorecard metric, but have we displaced the goal with a measure?
Strathern’s law states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This replacement can become a subversion, such as when NYC police needed to maintain high crime numbers for funding, they implemented a “stop-and-frisk” policy that infringed on citizens’ rights. Instead of “protect and serve” to inflate the measure it required harassment.
This is similar to a simulacra, where the original motivation is lost, yet the real-world effects are amplified and out of control