Vanity metrics are performance statistics that look impressive but don’t provide meaningful business results. You should be familiar with them if you’ve spent any meaningful part of your career in an organisation that was even a little dysfunctional. These are metrics that are usually announced during company-wide meetings with a good measure of chest thumping and pats on the backs, even though, at best, nothing has materially changed, and at worse, the company is barely surviving.

These are announcements like a new engineer has doubled conversion rate in 2 weeks, or a new executive has reduced a business process timeline by half. Under the scenes, there’s a fair amount of cherry picking, data manipulation and plain ol’ lying going on. It’s probably not a uniquely corporate phenomenon, vanity metrics are used in most social situations – we all might have a friend who likes to exaggerate their achievements and we’ve tuned our social radar to tone down metrics he keeps throwing around. But focusing on corporate environments, why do vanity metrics continue to proliferate organisations?

One reason might be the same reason we don’t call out our friend’s bullshit – there’s a social cost to calling someone out. Most non-confrontational people would rather tune their own bullshit detector than take on the public task of challenging someone’s words. This is probably amplified by the power asymmetry that exists in corporate organisations. How often have you publicly called out your boss at work for spewing BS?

A less malicious reason might be that vanity metrics add to, well, vanity. If you’re dissecting data to interpret any meaningful patterns, maybe there’s a bias, consciously or unconsciously, towards cherry-picking data that makes you or your team look good, and your efforts worthwhile. It’s also in vogue to make metrics harvesting so complicated, that eventually everyone becomes indifferent to the plethora of metrics being tracked and what qualifies as any meaningful progress.

A simple measure to combat this proliferation of vanity metrics might be to allow anyone to anonymously challenge any key metrics being reported within the organisation. Though, anyone with a shred of integrity and a half-decent grasp on the business fundamentals probably don’t need this feedback channel to spot them. But I’ve also seen them being used in board meetings and considering competent board members should be part of the previously mentioned cohort, I’m guessing they continue to remain popular in corporate settings because they’re working for people peddling them – they continue to make people and efforts look good, and maybe that’s a priority over the eventual fate of the business.