Scope creep in performance culture

And why I was a bad economics student

As a fresh-faced 19 year old Economics student, I threw myself into studying a world obsessed with the idea of constant growth. In a ‘healthy economy’ growth should be an ever-present (with guardrails around inflation and interest rates) and of course we measure growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a means of tallying up the collective output of the economy. The performance of the economy are measured by these means. The rules of the game are simple…

…Except they’re not. Simon Kuznets, the very man who created GDP as a gauge of post-WWI and Great Depression recovery acknowledged this when he warned against its use as a measure of progress, ‘The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,’ Kuznets cautioned.

And yet here I was, almost 100 years on from its creation, doing exactly that - using GDP as a proxy for welfare. Part of a global system that does exactly that - a system in which the owner of a forest that's stood for hundreds of years, allowing fauna and flora to thrive, regulating the local climate, maintaining the quality of the local soil, and providing people with a sustainable source of food, is making ‘progress’ when the forest is cut down and sold for lumber. It’s taking the old Greek proverb - Society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they’ll never sit in - and rewriting it to something like - the economy grows when old men cut down trees with little regard of who might’ve been enjoying the shade.

From where I’m sat writing this now, there is a moral to this story - that when we take something highly complex and boil it down to a simple utilitarian purpose with a simple measure of success, the things that lie outside of that definition are robbed of their inherent value.

In a sporting context, where the rules of the game are simple, the purpose of a player is easy to define, and performance can be assessed through points, goals, wins and trophies. When purpose and measure are clear like this, then optimising for performance is both achievable, and the smart thing to do if you want to win.

In business, things quickly become more complex - the most obvious response to the question of purpose would be to make money and the scoreboard then is obvious; but a) for a lot of people that’s a pretty hollow and unsatisfying purpose to pursue, and b) even if it’s true for the organisation as a whole; unless you’re in a directly commercial role then your day-to-day is likely to be far removed from money-making e.g. it’s hard to imagine assessing a software engineer solely on the basis of revenue generation. Organisations typically navigate this by looking at performance in a way that’s more specific to job function - trying to assess and optimise on that basis - in contrast to sport however, there’s no universally-agreed-upon scoreboard and there’s no televised game to rewatch, analyse and work out where performance needs to improve. Measuring performance quickly gets subjective and messy, but nevertheless is the endless pursuit of the organisation.

But what then when we scale that complexity to life itself? How to define the purpose of one’s life?

Herein lies my fear - that narratives of performance are creeping into parts of life where they have no business. That obsessing over performance in all parts of life hollows out our experience. It frames life as merely something functional and utilitarian; and us as some sort of machine to be optimised. It’s a world in black and white, with its vivid colours faded, and we end up becoming the forest that’s cut down and sold for lumber, with the many other beautiful things we bring to the world going unnoticed; and the more unmeasurable parts of life - creativity, leisure, connection, peace, contentedness - being diminished.

I’m not suggesting we abandon concepts of performance, but I am suggesting we keep the scope limited to those parts of our existence where its truly applicable.