Value Capture: When Metrics Take Over with C. Thi Nguyen

<p>MOPs &amp; MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional spaces organizations worldwide. Teamworks brings your scheduling, communications, athlete monitoring, and readiness data into one unified system — so your leaders stay informed, your people stay connected, and your unit stays ready. No more scattered spreadsheets or missed messages. Just one platform built for organizations where performance is the mission. Learn more at <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a></p><p>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;re programming for a military unit, a tactical team, or individual athletes, TrainHeroic gives you the tools to build and deliver professional training programs, track athlete progress, and communicate directly with your people — all through one app. Your athletes get world-class programming on their phone; you get the visibility to actually coach them. Start your free trial at <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a></p><p><strong>Why Gamification Is Ruining Military Human Performance — C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher</strong></p><p>Drew and Alex have been talking about Goodhart&#39;s Law, McNamara&#39;s Fallacy, and the tyranny of metrics for a while now. This week they bring in a philosopher who gave them the language to finally explain why — C. Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, whose work on games and gamification is the missing piece of that conversation.</p><p><strong>What we get into:</strong></p><p>Value capture in military human performance — when a unit starts chasing PT scores instead of physical readiness, when a strength coach starts optimizing athlete data instead of athlete outcomes, when a commander starts managing the metric instead of the mission. Value capture is the mechanism behind all of it. It&#39;s what happens when a simplified number colonizes your decision-making and you slowly forget what you were actually trying to accomplish.</p><p>The quantified self problem — HRV, sleep scores, readiness metrics, wearables. All genuinely useful. All capable of becoming the thing you optimize instead of the thing they were supposed to measure. The difference between a tool that informs your judgment and a tool that replaces it is one of the most important disti