Mangers and business people have an intense fascination with measuring things. This often is accompanied by a terrible fear of things that cannot be measured. The thinking goes that if you cannot measure something, then you can’t manage it; you can’t control it.
More importantly, if you can’t measure something, you can’t prove to your boss that you’re aligning tactical and strategical objectives; you’re unable to demonstrate that you’re enabling best practices and adding value to the company going forward.
I may mock the language, but there’s nothing wrong with the idea that something which is immeasurable bears with it a certain degree of risk. There’s always the chance that things are going pear-shaped and no one will be able to tell before it is too late. Where this becomes a fallacy is when people, afraid that something is going unmeasured and that they are flying blind, force poor metrics on to something.
Metrics reflect your understanding of an activity or thing. If you understand it well, you’ll also understand which status indicators are reliable (or unreliable). If you have an incomplete or flawed understanding, your indicators may be no better than random.
Poor metrics are far worse than no metrics. The reason for this is that people always optimize towards the metrics they have. This a natural thing, not necessarily a bad thing… but it becomes a bad thing if the metrics in place are bad. Putting bad metrics in place takes people’s better judgment away from them. Imagine that you assign a task to someone, and they ask, “How do I know if I’m doing it right?” Think about two different responses:
“I’m not sure – figure it out as you go.”
and
“If you have a high critical performance index, you can’t be far wrong”
In the first case, they have a chance of leaning on experience and the feedback they get while doing the task. If they’ve done similar tasks, they may be able to approach the problem carefully and thoughtfully and arrive at some sort of reasonable metric.
If you slap a bad metric in place, they’ll just follow it. They may not even question it. Slapping a bad metric on something essentially broadcasts the message, “I understand this problem – doing X means you’re solving it well”. It discourages critical thinking around the problem. Well intentioned people always want to do the best job possible – so you can bet that they’ll sink significant amounts of time and effort into getting their numbers up. People always optimize their behavior according to the metrics they are given – it’s how we all do things.
How is masking a dangerous hole in your knowledge better than flagging it as an unknown?
I’d prefer a little honest ignorance rather than false understanding. If you don’t know, say so.