Goodhart's Law cautions against a peculiar human folly - our tendency to optimize for the wrong objectives.
Take internship mentors.
Naturally, we gravitate towards expertise and seniority as qualifications. The subject matter gurus, the grizzled veterans who've weathered a thousand battles and use every instance to compare battle scars.
Seems logical enough.
Except these traits have absolutely null, zero, nada to do with the ability to actually nurture young talent.An expert is no more guaranteed to be a gifted teacher than a chef is a skilled waiter.
And years of tenure? About as predictive of mentoring prowess as male baldness. By fixating on these shallow proxies, we undermine the very goal we strive after - providing transformative internship experiences for the next generation.
It's akin to the outdated methods of baseball scouting that Billy Beane torched in the movie Moneyball, based on the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.
For decades, scouts prized a player's aesthetics and perceived "good face" over actual on-field performance. A pretty swing trumped the numbers that truly drove wins. Beane saw through this delusion.
With sabermetrics, he excavated the true signal from the noise.
He found the undervalued gems - players who lacked magazine-cover looks but possessed quantifiable skills to help the team win ballgames. Armed with better metrics, he assembled a playoff contender on a shoestring.
Simply having a qualification does not guarantee they will be an effective mentor.
Beane's approach exposed the folly of blindly deferring to conventional criteria without questioning their validity. Just because scouts had always valued a chiseled jaw over on-base percentage didn't make it correct.
The same applies when companies recruit interns. We become enamored with aesthetics like the name of the school, the specific year the student is in and things like grades or whether the teacher likes or dislikes a student, filtering out the unconventional talents.
We must continually re-examine the yardsticks we revere. Do they truly measure what's essential? Or have we become distracted by superficial stand-ins that constrain our vision?
To optimize for meaningful outcomes requires the humility to realign towards authentic value. To measure not what's easy, but what actually moves the needle.