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- Mallen Baker, 1 March 2010
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Opinion:
Stakeholder engagement Must everything important be measured?
As physicists know, if you measure something you change it. In the case of your relationship with customers, youll probably spoil it, says Mallen Baker
Unfashionable though it may be, I hold that a lot of measurement would be undesirable and counter-productive. Sometimes you absolutely have to measure. And then you set targets. And you find ways to meet or exceed them.
That works well for controllable processes, where there is an obvious direction of travel. You want less CO2 emitted. The less you have, the more successful you have been.
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Comments:
Stakeholder engagement Must everything important be measured? - Chris Moorhouse, 1 Mar 2010
Mallen, I couldn't agree more. I used to get incredibly vexed by the statement - "if you can't measure it you can't manage it" which IMHO is a huge cop out. There are an enormous number of things that have to be managed by leaders at all levels in an organisation in order to achieve extraordinary results which either can't be measured or as you point out should not be measured. One of the lessons I learned early on is be very careful what management information you ask for because folk will focus on it and maximise or minimise it even if that was not why you were asking. Targets can be very useful in some circumstances but only if the consequences of setting them are clearly understood
Response - measurement - Alex Twigg, 25 Mar 2010
Really liked your "hypothetical" examples illustrating the unintended consequences of measurement Mallen. The problem with measurement is that its effect is to seperate wholes into parts and force a simple cause and effect relationship onto disagregated parts of the whole that reflect more about our assumptions of how things work than how they really work. I think we confuse measuring with data and information especially where we use measurements to establish targets rather than simply count outcomes or results. Our need to measure it seems to me reflects our vain hope of control. Using data and information to understand patterns and ratios and whole system dynamics only allows us to hope that we might dance with the system rather than control it. And not withstanding the evidence of a reality of discontinous and rapid change we still cling to the illusion that we might control and force systems to our bidding ... giving rise to teh vain hope of "if we can measure it better we might just be able to control it". Have you read H Thomas Johnson's excellent book "Profit Beyond Measure: extraordinary results through attention to people and process"?
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