The Cobra Effect: why managing by metrics backfires |
The Cobra Effect: why managing by metrics backfires
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
[Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images]
With the growing momentum of the “No Kings” protests, activists have increasingly turned to the 3.5% rule—Erica Chenoweth’s observation, based on over a century of historical data, that once a protest movement mobilizes 3.5% of the population, it achieves its goals within a year. As a result, many have begun to treat the 3.5% threshold as a primary objective.
Not so fast. Even Chenoweth herself has cautioned that the rule is “a........