How do you measure "regret" ?

COMPLETE THE SAYING: “What gets measured gets ??????”

If you said “managed” you’d be right. Sort of.

The saying “What gets measured gets managed”, is almost always attributed to the great Peter Drucker.

But he (by his own admission) never said it.

Nor is it even the full quote.

The full quote changes the assumed meaning completely.

I always thought of the saying as a bit of a management credo. An affirmation that for effective operations everything must be measured.

Measured, categorized, analysed, averaged, and aggregated.

The more the better.

I’ve been in countless meetings where some smug spreadsheet monkey would pipe up with, “what gets measured gets managed”. Everyone would nod sagely. Then someone would pipe up with “SMART” objectives and off we’d go down the rabbit-hole.

But the actual quote. The full quote has a very different slant:

““What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”.

It was written by V.F. Ridgeway in 1956 as an admonition AGAINST the management by measurement mania.

There are plenty of examples where measuring something that seemed to be perfectly rational and logical turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

The first that springs to my mind is often called the “MacNamara” fallacy.

Named after the US Defence Secretary during the Vietnam War.

He chose to use “body count” as the primary measure. This might be a vaguely useful metric in a conventional conflict of attrition. In a guerrilla war, every “body” counted recruits two more. We all know how that ended.

Another example would be UK hospitals striving to reduce “waiting time” in emergency rooms.

The result. Patients being left in the ambulance (the clock doesn’t begin until admitted!) and doctors prioritizing minor cases ahead of serious because on average that’s faster.

There is a strange and pervasive belief that anything that cannot be measured must be unimportant.

This is reckless and dangerous.

Not everything that can be measured matters. Not everything that matters can be measured.

To date the International System of Units has no measure for such important things as hope, morale, or regret.

I did hear a brilliant idea for measuring regret in “Best” units.

The “Best Unit” named after Pete Best. The drummer who quit the Beatles just before their success.

This would be a scale of 1-100 bu

• Quitting the Beatles = 100bu
• Missing your flight = 50bu
• Forgetting to charge your phone = 10bu

I find it genuinely distressing how predictable the problems are with focussing on easily quantifiable, yet meaningless metrics.

I reckon that everyone sectretly knows it’s a sham.

Here’s three questions to finish with ...

1.??????What is your company’s NPS score?

2.??????How passionate are employees about your purpose and vision?

3.??????Which of the above is more important for long term enduring success?