Toxic Metrics

I had a delightful lunch today with an old and dear friend. He lives in the US and is hence is exposed even more to the culture of capitalism than we are in Oz. He introduced me to a new term, "toxic metric". A toxic metric put simply is a metric introduced as a way of measuring progress to something we really care about, but once introduced the metric becomes the target even as it starts to diverge from the actual goal. NAPLAN svhool progress testing is demonstrating this tendency in society. In business it is the call holding time statistic in call centres. Feel free to add to the list - and to promote the term.