The second essay in the Prior Obligations series, released as articles in audio format, follows a number from birth to dashboard. When a felt condition becomes a score out of one hundred, it acquires an owner, a target, and a budget — everything except a cure — and the question of which way its correlations actually run turns out to matter more than the score itself.

In This Article:

• A score is never merely descriptive; the moment it exists it acquires the apparatus of institutional life, and the apparatus acquires an interest in the condition's persistence.
• When a measure becomes a target it stops measuring; employees who notice their answers have consequences soften the answers.
• The headline correlations run at least as plausibly in reverse: the confident and secure adopt demanding tools, the anxious abstain.
• The score may be measuring the team, not the technology — where interpersonal risk is survivable, the anxieties are conversation topics.
• The exemplars are chosen for the legibility of their numbers, not the durability of their results; the metric nobody dashboarded was quality, and it reversed the flagship strategy when it finally arrived.

A Thought With Which To Sit: "A number is easier to own than a failure, which is why failures are so often converted into numbers."