My 6.5 year old son was routinely losing stationery at school. I tried the usual mommy tricks to get him to be more careful -- coaxing, cajoling, encouraging, scolding, denying, making him manage with less, giving him a free hand with ALL stationery in the house, but nothing worked.
Finally, in desperation, I instituted a reward. I said that if he managed to get all his stationery back home *25* times (no, not necessarily in a row), I would take him to a toy shop and let HIM choose whatever he wanted. The first few days I would diligently check his stationery and give him smileys or sad faces on a tracker, depending on whether everything came back.
After a few days of adjusting the the new "structure", he became fairly enthusiastic and his stationery started coming back regularly (to the extent that he now even has eraser "crumbs").
So far, so good.
BUT... he was SO focused on making good on the stationery metric that he started losing other things -- things he had NEVER lost before like his water bottle and snack boxes!
This completely brought home for me the oft-repeated but seldom fully-understood point of "metrics drive behavior". Here was a smart, intelligent 6.5 year old focusing so keenly on the incentive structure I had set up, that other (more important?) things began to fall through the cracks.
As Paul Graham says, "Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. ... Corollary: be careful what you measure."
Metric driven behavior in action!
:-|
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