Chapter 9 - THE METRIC PROBLEM
Grant’s audit found something bigger than Daniel.
Blake Logistics had excellent on-time numbers.
Too excellent.
Not fabricated.
Categorized aggressively.
If a route missed window because of weather:
weather exception.
Mechanical failure:
equipment exception.
But if a driver stopped due to:
medical distress,
unsafe load,
fatigue concern,
roadside hazard,
or non-company emergency,
supervisors often coded the result as driver-caused delay.
Why?
Customer scorecards excluded some recognized exceptions but counted driver delays.
This made drivers afraid of becoming the reason a route missed.
One driver admitted working through dizziness.
Another skipped reporting a loose trailer light until after delivery.
No catastrophic accident had resulted.
Yet.
Daniel’s case exposed the incentive.
Jackson defended the system:
“Accountability requires ownership.”
The safety executive answered:
“Not when ownership discourages reporting.”
Metrics were not lying.
They were teaching behavior.
The audit team sampled two hundred delay records.
Most were normal.
Some favored employees.
Some hurt them.
No conspiracy.
No secret spreadsheet ordering managers to punish safe behavior.
What emerged was subtler.
Supervisors had discretion.
They used it under pressure.
When quarterly numbers were weak, ambiguous incidents were more likely to become driver-caused.
When numbers were strong, the same incidents sometimes became operational exceptions.
The policy did not explicitly demand manipulation.
The incentive made interpretation drift.
Victoria’s compliance chief called it:
“metric-dependent judgment.”
Jackson hated the phrase because it sounded like dishonesty.
May you like
It was not exactly that.
It was inconsistency shaped by fear.
