Measurement and Uncertainty

tl;dr: when we choose to measure, we also choose to not measure.

The “bible,’ if you will, of the ‘OKReligion’ as I like to call the believers in the Objectives and Key Results Methodology is called “Measure What Matters.”

It was written by a relatively famous venture capitalist,?John Doerr, ?and is often times credited as the catalyst for the increased adoption of OKRs by many companies, particularly in the tech world.

The title gives away the premise.

Measuring what matters (how much did you sell last month?) versus a “vanity metric” (e.g. how many followers do you have on Instagram?) is the essential activity of setting the “right” OKRs.

Setting the “right” OKRs, however, sounds a heckuva lot easier than it is. It’s actually really challenging. Figuring out, for each person in the organization, what the right metrics that will really drive the business forward, takes a lot of time, effort, and practice.

And it also takes patience and a high tolerance for mistakes and learning. These are all good things in a knowledge organization. In fact, there essential.

But they also represent a deliberate choice that you will measure A instead of B. (Typically there are, at most, 5 Key Results-usually 3, so you can measure A, B, and C, but you see what I am saying).

At a certain point, too many metrics are meaningless. The important thing is to pick the ONE within a function, discipline, or role that you believe is the most important to making a significant impact.

And, since OKRs are as much about what you DON’T do as what you DO do, it’s an intentional move to say “Metric D is just not that important as an outcome for us this quarter.”

I bring all of this up because of my Quixotic effort to understand Quantum and connect it to everything that I think about these days. Although, as the Richard Feynman?said , “”If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

Nevertheless, I push on and here’s why this came to mind today.

In?Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality , Levy writes about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,

“we can never know-experimentally or in principle- a quantum entity’s position and momentum (considered to be the two measurable variables which are the cornerstones of classical physics) at the same time.”

which leads to a quote of?John Wheeler? who saaid

“The great lesson of quantum mechanics, if we choose to measure one thing, we prevent the measurement of something else.”

There’s an old adage, attributed to?H. Thomas Johnson

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost”

or as Dan Ariely wrote in HBR,?“You are what you measure.”

So, while technically, it’s possible to measure A, B, C, D,….Z in an organization, something has to take priority or else you don’t get alignment and a concerted push/effort. By selecting “what matters,” we are making that choice, but that choice means we become “blinded” in a way to other metrics that, maybe once upon a time, we felt were important.

Quantum tells us that we really can’t do both.

All of these are reminders of the quantum principles above and are inherent to good OKRs as well as effective outcome generation.

Mindfulness about what we choose to measure should equate with mindfulness about what we are choosing to not measure.

Pick wisely.