When the Means Becomes the End

Share Beyond the Status Quo: Leading Public Sector Transformation

Happy Tuesday, Transformation Friends. Another week, another opportunity to go Beyond the Status Quo.

Today, we’re following up on an idea from the sociologist Robert Merton that I leaned on in last time, in the article on the Auditor General’s five spring audit reports. He calls it “goal displacement.”

Goal displacement happens when a rule, process, or measure created to serve a purpose gradually becomes the purpose. Think of the rule everyone follows, but nobody can explain, the form completed because it has always been completed, or the metric a team works hard to report on, even when no one really understands why.

The means becomes the end.

Public services rely on rules and measures for good reasons. They support fairness, accountability, and consistent treatment, so a citizen in Fredericton can expect the same treatment as one in Victoria. That consistency helps large public institutions earn trust.

The arrangements that create consistency can also produce rigidity. Merton gave that problem a particularly influential bureaucratic account more than 80 years ago.

Today, we’ll start with Merton’s argument, follow how later researchers extended it from rules to targets and proxies, and close with four practices that can keep those means tied to their purpose and not some type of self-licking ice cream cone.

Grab your morning coffee (or ice cream!), and let’s get started.

Merton began with Max Weber’s 1922 account of modern bureaucracy. Weber saw rules, hierarchy, expertise, and impersonal decision-making as major technical achievements. They let a large institution apply decisions consistently, preserve continuity as people change, and protect official work from personal favour (Weber, 1978).

Merton’s contribution was to examine the pressures created by that structure (Merton, 1940). Reliable behaviour requires discipline and a strong devotion to rules. Bureaucracies reinforce that devotion through training, defined authority, graded careers, promotion, pensions, and status. Together, these features reward methodical and cautious conformity.

Over time, that devotion can loosen from its original purpose. Merton described adherence to rules moving from an instrumental value, something useful for reaching a goal, into a terminal value, something treated as worthwhile in itself.

This is the displacement of goals.

The rule was created to serve a purpose. Gradually, following the rule becomes the purpose.

Merton used a phrase from the economist Thorstein Veblen to explain part of the mechanism: “trained incapacity.” Under changed conditions, skills and habits that once worked well can become blind spots. A team that applies a policy flawlessly may struggle to recognize when the policy no longer fits the case at hand.

His most vivid figure is the “bureaucratic virtuoso,” the official who remembers every rule and becomes unable to assist many of the people the rules were created to serve. Many of us have encountered this pattern. Some days, we have embodied it ourselves.

Merton focused on what happens when rules and routines acquire value of their own. Later researchers found related problems in measurement, incentives, and target systems.

In 1979, social scientist Donald Campbell described what became known as Campbell’s Law: the more heavily a quantitative indicator is used in decision-making, the more vulnerable it becomes to corruption pressure and the more likely it is to distort the process it monitors (Campbell, 1979).

Standardized testing was one of his examples. When test scores carry high stakes, teaching can narrow toward what the test rewards. The score still measures something real, while the pressure changes what people do to produce it.

Anyone who has prepared for a Second Language Evaluation may recognize the cause and effect here. Studying to pass the test over studying to achieve the desired outcomes of bilingualism.

A related idea became widely known as Goodhart’s Law. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern gave it the form most people quote:

Campbell and Strathern sharpen Merton’s insight in an important way. A measure does more than describe behaviour; once it carries consequences, it shapes behaviour. People allocate attention, effort, and resources toward what the system recognizes and rewards. The indicator can improve even as its relationship to the larger purpose weakens.

Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood examined this dynamic in the English National Health Service. The government had attached published ratings, reputational consequences, and management sanctions to national performance targets. Reported performance improved in several areas, including waiting times.

The same regime produced significant gaming, measurement gaps, and output distortions. Some providers changed booking practices or reported data in ways that helped them reach thresholds. The star ratings also had a weak relationship with some measures of clinical quality. These problems made the headline results harder to interpret (Bevan and Hood, 2006).

Bevan and Hood described a target as a synecdoche, one part standing in for a larger whole. Every target leaves something (many things) out. When the target carries enough weight, an organization can optimize the measured part while other dimensions receive less attention.

Their conclusion was measured. The evidence could not show how much gaming had undermined the reported improvements. They recommended stronger target design, better data audit, and monitoring capable of detecting predictable responses to pressure. Targets can focus attention and support improvement. Their design determines how much confidence we can place in the story they tell.

The most recent turn came in 2024, when Yohan John and colleagues gave the broader family of problems a name: proxy failure. When enough pressure is placed on an imperfect stand-in for a goal, the system begins optimizing the stand-in and its connection to the real goal weakens (John et al., 2024).

Goal displacement is one version of that problem. Rules, targets, and indicators make a messy reality manageable. Under enough pressure, the manageable part can become the part that receives the attention, funding, and care.

Careful thinking can reduce these persistent risks. In practice, we need to treat every rule and measure as a proxy borrowed from a purpose.

Here are four practices teams can use.

1. Name what the rule or measure serves

For any rule or indicator your team treats as important, finish the sentence: “We use this because…” If nobody can explain the connection to an outcome, the means may already be drifting.

Benefits management helps make that connection explicit by tracing outputs and new capabilities through outcomes to benefits. Leading indicators provide early evidence about whether a change is progressing. Lagging indicators show later effects. Both remain partial representations of the result, so use them together and check them against direct outcome measures and qualitative evidence.

Use early indicators to guide action. Continue measuring long enough to determine whether the intended benefit was realized.

2. Put the purpose on a schedule.

A measure can drift even as its value remains steady because the policy, service, or operating environment has changed. Build a purpose review into the same calendar as financial reviews and performance reporting.

Once a quarter, or at each major milestone, place the rule or measure beside its intended outcome and ask:

• Does this still tell us what we intended it to tell us?

• Has the purpose or operating context changed?

• Would we choose the same approach if we were starting today?

Give someone clear ownership of that review. A ten-minute check can identify a stale measure before it directs months of effort away from the intended outcome.

3. Pair high-stakes measures with balancing evidence.

When a measure carries consequences, ask how reasonable responses to pressure could improve the number while weakening the underlying outcome. Pair speed with quality, volume with usefulness or durability, and quantitative indicators with qualitative review or audit.

Benefits management also asks us to identify disbenefits, measurable negative effects that stakeholders may experience alongside the intended gains. Tracking them can reveal what a target is displacing and help teams choose useful balancing evidence.

More measures can create more proxies, so restraint matters. Choose the smallest set that reveals the main trade-offs, then test the story through cases, feedback, and professional judgement.

4. Protect discretion, and make it safe to use.

Rules protect fairness, rights, safety, and accountability, so discretion needs clear boundaries. Give staff criteria for recognizing exceptional cases, a documented route for seeking or using an exception, and leadership support when they exercise approved judgment.

Review recurring exceptions as evidence. If conscientious staff repeatedly need the same workaround, the rule or one of its assumptions may need to change. This creates a feedback loop between those applying the rule and those responsible for its continued fitness.

Merton’s insight remains useful because it names a recurring risk built into formal systems: rules and measures can drift from the purposes they serve. Later work shows how incentives and pressure can accelerate that drift. We can respond by making purpose explicit, reviewing measures, watching for displaced harm, and preserving bounded discretion.

Three questions to carry into your week:

1. Which rule or number does your team treat as fixed, and what purpose was it created to serve?

2. How might normal pressure make that number improve while the underlying result weakens, and what evidence would reveal it?

3. Where have we exercised discretion so tightly that staff struggle to adapt a rule while still meeting its public purpose?

Until next time, stay curious and I’ll see you Beyond the Status Quo.

Leave a comment

Bevan, G. and Hood, C. (2006) ‘What’s measured is what matters: targets and gaming in the English public health care system’, Public Administration, 84(3), pp. 517–538.

Campbell, D.T. (1979) ‘Assessing the impact of planned social change’, Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), pp. 67–90.

John, Y.J., Caldwell, L., McCoy, D.E. and Braganza, O. (2024) ‘Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47.

Merton, R.K. (1940) ‘Bureaucratic structure and personality’, Social Forces, 18(4), pp. 560–568.

Strathern, M. (1997) ‘Improving ratings: audit in the British University system’, European Review, 5(3), pp. 305–321.

Weber, M. (1978) Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.