Purposive Drift

Measuring what doesn't matter

I am currently doing some work for a college that is going through convulsions as it attempts to make itself more bureaucratic in order to deal with external quality assurance exercises. Seeing very competent, experienced colleagues, who have been doing good work for many years, struggling with the gobbledygook they are expected to learn to deal with stuff is both frustrating and sad, particularly since I've been here before and seen real quality work destroyed by similar processes.

So I've been a bit cheered by being alerted to the work of Thomas Johnson (courtesy of Paul Skidmore at Demos Greenhouse). A taster:

"Ed Deming used say that 97% of what matters in an organization can't be measured. Only maybe 3% can be measured. But when you go into most organizations and look at what people are doing, theyre spending all their time focusing on what they can measure and none of their time on what really matters--what they can't measure. Why would we do this? Were spending all of our time measuring what doesn't matter. In fact, its part of avoiding a lot of the really difficult and important issues, like virtue, as Bill OBrien has pointed out ... We spend almost none of our time on what really matters."

Intellectually, I know that the regime of targets and mindless measurement will eventually collapse under its own weight, but what saddens me is the people it continues to harm and the organisations and companies unnecessarily undermined as this process continues. What is encouraging is that I am finding more and more voices, like Thomas Johnson, questioning this nonsense.