Every quarter, the firm released a new set of benchmarks. Every quarter, the benchmarks had moved.
Kwame had been in the role for three years. He was, by any measure he could independently verify, performing well: clients renewed, projects delivered, colleagues satisfied. He understood the work and did it carefully. What he could not understand was why, each quarter, the measure of sufficient performance always arrived slightly above wherever he was.
Not dramatically above — just above. The threshold moved in small increments that tracked, with suspicious precision, the aggregate improvement of the team. As the team got better, the definition of adequate tracked upward. The distance between his position and the threshold remained approximately constant, regardless of what he actually achieved.
He mentioned this to a colleague over lunch. She stared at him for a moment and said: "You've noticed." He realised, then, that she'd been sitting with the same observation for months.
What about you?
Have you ever been in a system where the standard of 'good enough' tracked just above your performance — so that improvement never resulted in actual adequacy?
The system hadn't measured his performance. It had manufactured a deficit out of it. He'd been subtracted from himself by an architecture designed to leave everyone short.
He spent a few evenings mapping it out — not to escalate, but to understand. He graphed his output against the quarterly benchmark across twelve periods. The visual was clarifying. The two lines ran parallel. His performance and the threshold had been climbing in lockstep, maintaining a fixed gap as reliably as if someone had designed it that way.
Someone had designed it that way. That was the thing he'd been avoiding knowing.
He didn't leave immediately. But he did stop internalising the deficit as personal. The shortfall was not his. It was the system's product. He began keeping his own metrics alongside the official ones — measures he'd chosen, measuring things he'd decided mattered. They didn't give him a raise. They gave him back his judgment about his own work.
He left, eventually, for a role where the measures of adequacy didn't move every time he reached them. The contrast was immediate: not because the new environment was perfect, but because it was not architecturally committed to manufacturing his insufficiency.
What about you?
Have you ever kept your own metrics alongside an institution's — and found that the independent measure gave you back something the official one kept taking away?