The Measurement Dilemma: What Businesses Can Learn from Olympic Scoring Systems

By Andrew Rush

"Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave."

– Eliyahu Goldratt, The Goal

The 2024 Paris Olympics introduced a brand-new sport - breaking.

For many, including myself, it was the first exposure to breakdancing as a competitive sport.

While much attention was drawn to one Australian dancer and her interesting moves, a broader topic took center stage: the perceived skill level of the dancers. Many viewers felt the competitors were not as skilled those in well-known dance crews such as Jabbawockeez or Super Cr3w.

This discrepancy is rooted in a common problem found in both sports and business: what you measure directly influences how people act.

For breaking, the scoring system incentivized simpler, cleaner moves, and penalized repetition. As an example, a dancer who spins twenty times in a row would actually lose points for not having variety in their moves. Jeffrey Lous, a Team USA breaker, said to Yahoo Sports, “It's hard to trust the judging. Even though we try to make it objective, it's still subjective. It's art. You're judging art. And it's transformed into a sport.”

If the scoring prioritized spins or creativity, the dancers would have performed differently.

Other sports face the same problems.

Figure skating, for example, has ongoing debates about its scoring systems, with opponents of the current system saying that height and quantity of jumps are given undue emphasis. Polina Edmunds, a former Olympian and US National silver medalist, told Vox Media, “the artistic side of women’s skating has decreased a lot because of the numbers game that we’re trying to play.” If figure skaters were instead judged on performance or skating skills, they would perform differently.

The same issue occurs in business. Metrics, targets, and objectives must align with company goals.

We once worked with a company that wanted to grow its revenues by increasing the effectiveness of the sales team. So, they set aggressive targets for sales calls and sales meetings.

Meeting and call volumes soared, but there was a problem. There was no associated increase in revenue. There was, however, an increase in travel costs and expenses, which meant that the company was actually worsening its financial position.

When the trend continued, one of our process improvement specialists decided to shadow a salesperson and quickly discovered that the salesperson had gone to this same client twice in the same week, even though the client was fully bought in and there was no additional opportunity for a sale.

Based on the metrics he was being measured by, however, the salesperson was doing a great job. Look at how many meetings he was attending! If he had been measured on sales dollars, sales margin, or new business sold, he would have performed differently.

Sales is not the only area of business where performance metrics might be misaligned with target results. A manufacturing company might incentivize quality only to find production slowing as staff work to ensure that quality is top notch. A call center might measure staff based on number of calls, reducing customer service as staff rush to get off the phone and onto the next call. A retail store might get their staff to check in on shoppers more often but fail to see any associated increase in sales.

In each of these scenarios, if employees had been measured differently, they would have - you guessed it – performed differently.

When designing a scoring system for a new sport, judges must be careful to incentivize the kind of moves that will make the scoring fair and equitable for the athletes while maintaining the desired outcome for the fans.

Similarly, when setting measurements for any aspect of an organization, business leaders must ensure those measurements tie directly back to the success of the business.