You Can Manage What You Can't Measure

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

One of the most frequent (mis)quotes in business is the following:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics.

It turns out this is wrong, very wrong. This is not a minor subversion of the actual quote, it is almost a total reversal of what Dr. Deming actually said which is:

“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” – W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics.

“A costly myth”, one that seems to have only been perpetuated further and misattributed to Deming himself.

How many times has this been misquoted to you? Perhaps, more interestingly how many times have you heard the correct quote? I know in my experience I have heard the misquote too many times to count, and I’m not sure I have ever heard it correctly relayed.

At this point I should probably point out that I haven’t actually read The New Economics and I know very little about Dr. Deming beyond this quote, so the thoughts included here are all mine and not intended to be a treatise on Deming’s work. I also recognize I am far from the first to raise this point, but somehow the fallacy continues to thrive in the marbled corridors of corporate America and even more disappointingly in the open-space offices of Silicon Valley tech companies.

So why is it that such a huge perversion of this statement has been seized upon and embraced by modern managers and executives? Unfortunately, the answer is quite simple, one is much easier than the other. If you believe that everything can be boiled down to measurement in feet, ounces, widgets/second, points/hour, qubits, or some other absolute measurable unit then life becomes much easier. You know when your decisions were good because the unit measure improved. It makes so much sense and the world becomes simple and “manageable”. Now you can send your TPS reports upstairs where they can be reviewed and people can perpetuate the illusion that things are understood and under control. This is so very attractive of course because it disposes of all the difficult stuff, all the muck and mire. You want to look at business as a simple function with inputs and outputs, you have levers you can pull and see the results and tweak based on feedback, and yes there is a lot within business that fits that model and you should absolutely grab all the data you can and use it wisely in decision making and course correction, but between all those highly measurable milestones is where the difficult stuff hides and this is where the believer in this particular misquote can really run afoul.

Running a business is hard, there are a lot of moving parts and as companies grow leaders often start to panic as they can no longer see the whole playing field, they have to start trusting what people are telling them, and that is a hard thing to do, so what is the logical next step? Data. If we get rid of those opinions and gut feelings and replace them with cold hard data then we can really know what is going on, and we can ask the incisive questions and make great decisions about whom to fire because they are performing at 3.2 points/hour less than the next engineer. Again, data is great, but what often happens is data is demanded from the top for things that are simply not measurable, and rather than disappointing those at the top the message goes down the line to come up with some measurements dammit! So someone takes some data that was being collected for an entirely different reason and repurposes it as a leadership report, because hey it is better than nothing. The data flows back up the chain and by the time it reaches the top there is such relief that we are now data-driven that nobody asks difficult questions about the provenance of the data itself, it is now meshed and matrixed with 100 other questionable data points. Congratulations you are data-driven, you have won business.

Soylent Green is People!

So what is the difficult stuff, where does the misquote start to fail? In my experience where the measure to manage cultism gets dangerous is where humans are involved, especially humans doing intellectually challenging work, the kind of work that we can’t currently replace with machines. I have too many times seen managers looking for the magic measurement that will tell them who is an effective employee and who isn’t, if they can just find the quantitive measure then they can rank employees, improve them, pay them fairly, etc. Well, that sounds like a noble enough goal, and sure enough corporations and vendors spend huge amounts of money building evaluation systems that claim to do this. The thing is that they are always a convenient deception, sure the presentation layer is full of convincing numbers and data to support the conclusions, just don’t dig down, because before long you get to a layer where a human had to make some kind of gut-based decision on whether to score the employee a 7 or an 8 on “Communication skills” a description of which might include guidelines such as “Effectively reads subtle cues and body language” and “Is smooth without being slick”. I’m wandering into performance appraisal territory which is a whole topic for another day, but this is just one way that this desperation to remove humanity from managing humans renders itself. This is not to suggest that numbers, evaluations, etc. are not valuable, but rather to make the point that numbers in of themselves are not magical, and reflexive worship of them is an alluring but dangerous convenience that too many fall into.

The Most Complicated of Machines

If like me you are a people manager (or even if you are someone who is managed) I’d like you to stop for a minute and think about your team. Picture the individuals on your team, who comes into your mind first? Is it the player that just saved your ass on some recent incident? Is it the employee who is a thorn in your side always pissing-off the rest of the team? Is it the member who has a sick wife that makes it hard for him to always make meetings? I bet for each team member you have a list of attributes, situations, and qualifications. You know whom you can rely on, you know whom you would want when push came to shove. You know who is confident, who needs to be built up, who is arrogant and needs to be reigned in. You have found ways to talk to the quietest of your team, to bring them out of their shell, you have found ways to discuss what is important to them and understand their personal goals and what makes them happy. You know how they interact, how they work together, you know they are humans with feelings and that makes them the most complicated of machines, they have desires, and dreams, they have responsibilities far greater than the work they do for your company.

These are all things you manage, every day.

Now, how do you measure them?

I don’t just mean how do you evaluate the individuals, although that is part of the question, I mean do you have a measure, a yardstick for each one of those factors that you are managing? Of course you don’t, yet you still manage them.

What I am suggesting is simple, but so very difficult for many organizations. Let’s move past treating employees as numbers and recognize the very complexity that comes with humanity in our organizations is what actually creates value.

You Can’t Say Culture without Saying Cult

So I’ve made my case that you can manage what you can’t measure and that in fact if you actually stopped for a minute that would be totally obvious, but here is where I have to throw a flag of caution because as with so many extremes the opposite can be equally dangerous. How many times have you heard the phrase “culture fit”? I hear it all the time and I have to admit in the past I have used it. On the surface it seems like a wholly positive thing, find people who are going to work well together, everyone will be happy and great things will happen.

The problem is that this leads to a monoculture, and monocultures are great at having tunnel vision. Whether we like it or not and no matter how woke we think we are we all have unconscious bias. These biases are built through our life experiences and exhibit themselves in ways we don’t even recognize or consciously comprehend (on the other hand if you are using a conscious bias in your human management, then you have no excuses for your behavior). Unconscious bias is often a major justification to take humanity out of managing humans, if we can’t even trust our unconscious minds to be fair to different people then we need to replace our responsibility with complicated grading frameworks and measurements to make sure we are fair, and of course, defend ourselves in court. This is a typical way for corporations to solve problems, add rules and guidelines and structure, which may give you some protection in court, but scuppers your ability to leverage the humanity, the real value, of your business.

Somewhere between only hiring clones of yourself and managing purely by numbers is the place we should be looking to land.

Like so many difficult things, recognizing and admitting the problem is a great first step and this is true for unconscious bias, being aware of it, considering it, and discussing it is a great way to combat it. So instead of culture fit, think about culture enhancement, how will this new candidate, or how does this current employee add richness to the culture through difference.

Why This Matters So Much To Me

Too many times I have seen the erroneous “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” idiom create an exhausting data culture that sucks the life and innovation out of teams, that leads teams to be measured on the wrong things that end up punishing them for doing the right things, that turns managers into number monkeys figuring out how to work around the unfair and inaccurate system that has been put in place. My goal as a manager is to create an environment that allows innovation and joy, that respects humans for their individuality rather than trying to disassemble them into their component functional aspects. I believe that by doing this I can achieve the greatest success for the companies I work for while creating a kick-ass environment for my teams.

Data is massively valuable, but what makes it less valuable is mixing it with poor quality data. Pick the things that are really important to measure, that can be reliably measured, and watch them like a hawk, but don’t stop there. There is a whole lot more to manage, and don’t sweat it if those other things can’t be measured, that is where good managers come in.