"Every act of measurement disturbs the system being measured.
Measurement is intervention. The moment a metric is tracked, it starts to steer attention, incentives, and what people hide. Even honest teams adapt to the scoreboard. The system doesn’t just respond to the metric; it routes effort toward it.
In engineering orgs, this can be subtle: cycle time leads to smaller tickets without simpler systems; availability targets push risk to an unmeasured service; incident counts invite reclassification instead of reduction. The metric becomes the meeting.
Meadows is a reminder to name the tradeoff you are making when you measure. Decide what improvement the metric buys and what distortion it creates, then hold a counter-signal that keeps you honest. If you cannot name the distortion, you cannot trust the number. Write the distortion as plainly as the metric.