The New Deities: Measurement

I was reading the headline peering out at me from the magazine being read by the woman across the aisle of our mini-jet. It was featuring an article with one of the new clichés: "You Are What You Measure."

Of course, you are a good deal more. You are also what you never measured and a certain portion of you escapes your awareness altogether. Because I'd already congratulated myself (that is, my 'unmeasured self') on missing one flight today, I granted me permission to indulge a trivial irritation. The irritation? Thoughtless deification of formerly useful bits.

Since it's already come up, take measurement, for example. In all kinds of fields (physics and psychotherapy come to mind) the fact that measuring behavior has an effect on that behavior has proven a useful idea. In human behavior, we even have a number of useful studies that can help us predict the likely effects of that measurement.

But, that's never enough. Now, business writers of all stripes dramatically warn that what isn't measured doesn't even exist. Worse, if you can't assign numbers, you have no control!  (Sorry, got a little carried away there...)

The truth is that you can increase your sense of control and are more likely to increase the occurrence of those behaviors you are caught paying attention to. In organizational contexts, you 'pay attention' to things by counting them, or weighing them, or timing them.

However, as every Ph.D. candidate* trying to get a manageable dissertation question can tell you, the stuff that's really important is really hard to measure. Often the act of identifying reasonable metrics requires serious over-simplification of the factors that affect desired outcomes.

My point (and I do have one) is that virtues deified become tyrants. Unfortunately, there's a rumor that many consultants make their living by deifying one good thought or another. In the case of measurement, I'd propose a couple of iconoclastic actions:

1. Measure things that you intend to do something about. Before collecting any data, think about the decisions, actions, policies, practices, or amusement that you hope to derive from it. Make your motto: No More Dusty Binders We Never Open.

2. Pay attention to intuition and critical thinking. Intuition is the mental application of the algorithms of experience to complex or partial information. There are things your gut knows that your brain hasn't figured out yet. 

Your monotheistic friend,

Doug

*I wasn't thinking of you.

Comments

[robin andrea]

Hi Doug-- I think I know you from a very long time ago. Did we meet at a anti-war protest in Washington DC in 1970? You were a student at Howard university, and I was getting ready to move to California from New Jersey? You officiated at my sister Lynn's wedding in my parent's backyard? Is this you?

If yes, hello to you.

Robin

PS-- I am a devout anti-monotheist.