For every one person in an organisation who comes up with a great idea … imagine ten people looking over their shoulder focusing on how to quantify it or measure it … Thinking … what criteria shall we use to measure it’s quality, the effectiveness of it’s implementation, if it will make customers happy, if it will improve process efficiency … and than there are the financial performance measures, the potential sales figures, cost-savings and ROI … But why … why do we place so much focus on measuring the performance of our ideas and the effect of their implementation?

In a recent presentation I became concerned as a group of very bright students commented … ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it’ … a learning from their class on Strategic Planning … but can we actually control anything ... by asking a customer if they are satisfied does that mean you can control their satisfaction ... and how does one measure satisfaction ... eeekkk!!  

I once thought it was for insights and ideas, however very quickly learn’t that insights can come from anywhere … a conversation, an observation, a photograph, a dataset of numbers, the office environment within which we work, the people with whom we socialise or perhaps the radio show host as I drive home …

So why do we place so much focus on measuring performance, process and output … Is it for insights and ideas for our business moving forward? Or is to control (as the students were taught!), to report and justify the decisions we make, the money we spend?

So if you measure anything ... I'm curious ... why do you measure it? and why do you measure it the way that you do?  

kp ...