Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

We live in a culture that is crazy about numbers.  The dominant belief is that numbers are what is real.  When something is real, it’s yours to manage and control.

We increasingly depend on numbers to know how we are doing for virtually everything.  We ascertain our health with numbers.  How many calories or grams should I eat?  What’s my cholesterol reading?  We assess one another with numbers.  What’s your I.Q.?  What’s your GPA?  Your Emotional Intelligence?  And of course we judge organizational viability only with numbers.  What’s the customer satisfaction rating?  Inventory turns?  P/E ratio?

The desire to be good managers has compelled many people to be earnest students of measurement.  A critical question to consider is, “Does what you measure determine what is meaningful, or does what is meaningful determine what you measure?”  It’s time to learn the importance of using measurement to give you the kind and quality of feedback that supports and welcomes people to step forward with their desire to contribute, to learn, and to achieve.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

What Do We Measure and Why? by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

Journal for Strategic Performance Management, June 1999

Highlights from the article:

• Most managers want reliable, high quality work. They want commitment, focus, teamwork, learning, and quality.  But these behaviors are never produced by measurement. They are performance capabilities that emerge as people feel connected to their work and to each other and as colleagues develop a shared sense of what they hope to create together.  They emerge as people operate in an environment where everyone feels welcome to contribute to that shared hope. Each of these qualities and behaviors is a choice that people make. People can't be punished or paid into these behaviors.
    

• But to look at prevailing organizational practice, most managers seem consistently to choose measurement as the route to these capacities. They agonize to find the right reward that can be tied to the right measure. Ironically, the longer we try to garner these behaviors through measurement and reward, the more damage we do to the quality of our relationships, and the more we trivialize the meaning of work.  How many employees have become experts at playing "the numbers game" to satisfy bosses rather than becoming experts at their jobs?
    

• But measurement is critical. It can provide something that is essential to sustenance and growth: feedback. All life thrives on feedback and dies without it. We have to know what is going on around us, how our actions impact others, how the environment is changing, how we're changing. If we don't have access to this kind of information, we can't adapt or grow. Without feedback, we shrivel into routines and develop hard shells that keep newness out.
    

• Measurement needs to serve the deepest purposes of work. It is only when we connect at the level of purpose that we willingly offer ourselves to the organization. When we have connected to the possibilities of what we might create together, then we want to gather information that will help us be better contributors.
    

• Remember, “Does what you measure determine what is meaningful, or does what is meaningful determine what you measure?” 

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whymeasure.html

   
Design Criteria for Measurement Processes

In any living system, feedback differs significantly from measurement. To develop measurement processes that support the behaviors and capacities we need, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers suggest the following design criteria:

1. Who gets to create the measures?  Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work.  People support what they create.

2. How will we measure our measures?  How can we keep measures useful and current?  What will tell us when they become obsolete?

3. Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid?  Are they open enough?  Do they invite in new information that might challenge our current assumptions?

4. Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization?  Will this information help us deepen and expand the meaning of our work?

5. What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation?  How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process?

These design criteria are not difficult to implement.  But they do requite extraordinary levels of participation - defining and using measures becomes everyone’s responsibility.
 

“If we were to set out to design an efficient system for the methodical destruction of community, we could do no better than our present efforts to monetize all value and reduce life to the tyranny of measurement.  Money, markets, and measurement have their place.  They are important tools indeed.  We should honor and use them.  But they do not deserve the deification their apostles demand of us, before which we too readily sink to our knees.  Only fools worship their tools.”

- Dee Hock, former CEO of VISA in One from Many - VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

  
Next Month

Change happens, not in a top-down manner, but as networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.  Change isn’t something we can mandate by getting other people to “buy in” and “motivating” them through rewards and punishments.  Emergence is the process by which all large-scale change happens on this planet. 

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