"That Which Gets Measured Gets Managed" ~ Peter F. Drucker Is it possible to manage something by simply observing it? Heisenberg suggested that by observing something we can change it. Drucker suggests that by measuring something we can change it. But is it really possible? Listen to this episode to learn more.
Two Peter F. Drucker book recommendations (in order):
Hunter Powers: Welcome to The One. I'm your host, Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from our nation's capital, D.C. Proper, Washington, D.C. Today's One Idea is, "That which gets measured gets managed." This quote comes from Peter Drucker. Peter is a very famous management consultant and educator. He worked with many very large companies, starting in the early 1940s, and wrote many successful books on management. His most famous book is probably The Effective Executive, which is a recommended read. It's pretty quick and there's some good value there and if you like that and want another one, take a look at Managing Oneself.
Hunter Powers: But today we will take a look at his quote, "That which gets measured gets managed." What does it mean? Do we agree with it, and how can we leverage it? "That which gets measured gets managed." So what does it mean to measure something? I think we traditionally associate measuring with some form of quantification. We count how many of a thing we have. We count the progress towards something. We take a reading, but that reading is often a count of something, often a number, but it certainly doesn't have to be a number. It could be a photograph, picture. And it doesn't have to be a quantification; it can be a qualification.
Hunter Powers: How are you feeling today? How engaged are you with your work? How well do you understand your goals, the progress towards your goals? How strongly do you believe that you can accomplish your goals? These are all measurements, but they're more qualifications than quantifications. So a measurement is a descriptor of status, some tidbit of information that helps us understand the state of a situation, a project, a person, of anything, of that. We'll go back to the quote, "That which gets measured." It can be anything.
Hunter Powers: So what is a descriptor of something that helps us understand its state? That which gets measured, that which we create any sort of descriptor of its state, gets managed. What does it mean to be managed? In this context, it means to be worked on and to be worked on for the better. So this quote, "That which gets measured gets managed," means that anything that we take the time to track some descriptor of its status will then get worked on to try to improve that descriptor of its status. That which gets measured gets managed. That which we take the time to regularly describe its status will receive effort towards improving its status.
Hunter Powers: So do we agree with it? This quote and this idea actually has a moderate amount of controversy behind it, although I think that controversy comes from a bad interpretation of the quote. So I'm going to start with the controversy and then we'll pull it back a few layers. The application of, "That which gets measured gets managed," is usually in the form of, create some metric to monitor things and then work on improving that metric. And let's give a very simple example.
Hunter Powers: You have a company and you're going to create a metric for the number of customers that you have and you're going to start recording it weekly. Every week, you're going to write down the number of customers and you're going to create some kind of a dashboard where all the employees of the company can see the number of customers. And again, according to this quote, "That which gets measured gets managed," now that you are weekly recording the number of customers, there'll be more attention towards increasing the customer base. And the controversy over this is that when you set metric goals, you set a goal ... Let's say today you have 25 customers and your goal within the next two months is to have 50 customers, that everyone will optimize towards hitting that goal at the cost of everything else. Right?
Hunter Powers: I don't know. Maybe your main product costs $100. Well, lower it down to a penny, and again, assuming it's worth $100, you're going to hit your customer goal in no time at all. But at that point it was sort of a dumb idea, wasn't it? There wasn't a question of, if you gave away all of your services or products, could you add some more customers? And so the controversy around these goals and these ideas of being so hyper results focused on specific metrics is that then you, by default, optimize your business towards these very specific metrics at the cost of everything else.
Hunter Powers: And so that's why the detractors will say, "This is a bad idea." But I don't believe that that is this idea. This idea, that which gets measured gets managed, says nothing about setting goals and targets. This idea is that, by simply recording it and acknowledging it, that it will become part of your active thought process, and that, where there are issues with these numbers, they will be managed, they will be worked on, that forward progress will happen.
Hunter Powers: So in the customer example, we don't set a goal of getting 50 customers but we do start watching the number of customers that we have, in that by merely watching it, the right kind of progress will happen. Now, I've seen this in action. I've seen it work and my best examples are very engineering specific, but I think they generalize well. So here's the first example. We started measuring, "How many days a week are engineers writing code?" Now, you might think if you're not familiar with the field of software development that a programmer must write code every single day. I mean, that's their job, isn't it? They program. It's in the name. You're a programmer, you program. If you're not programming, you're not doing your job.
Hunter Powers: That is likely an outsider's viewpoint. They would find it very odd that you might go a day, a couple days, a week, without writing any code at all. But there are many other things that make up the job of a developer and it is not uncommon to go a full day without writing any code. But as a company, you do want your developers to be writing code. And you don't want to force it, you don't want bad habits. The other issues, you don't want them to not be taken care of, but ideally, you can optimize it so that they can spend the most of their time doing the thing that is going to bring your company the most value. So we started measuring, how many days per week are engineers writing code, and then we started publishing that number. And it started at three, by the way. Three days a week, on average, across the full team.
Hunter Powers: Engineers are writing code three days a week and there's no instruction, there's no mandate that you need to be writing code five days a week, four days a week, six days a week. Maybe you're writing code on the weekends. I don't know. Just a measurement. As we started to measure it, very quickly, that number started to climb, and it went from three all the way to four and a half, on average. And with that, we also saw a correlation with projects getting completed faster and we didn't notice any decrease in quality.
Hunter Powers: Now, you certainly could argue that there were some implied consequences, right? Even though you didn't actively manage towards a four and a half days per week on average of contributing, the fact that you were measuring it suggested to folks that, "Hey, you should probably be doing better than this." And that's fair, but I think the point is that that motivation was able to come internally from people, right? We didn't need to have a conversation with folks and say, "Look, you're not getting enough work done. You're not spending enough time doing the thing that you need to be doing, and we need you to set a goal and we're going to monitor this goal and we're going to be checking in on it and we're going to push you. And if you don't get this goal, you're going to lose your job." None of that had to happen.
Hunter Powers: People were able to say, "Huh, I'm only writing code three days a week. I think I want to write a little bit more." Or, "I never really thought about how many days a week I'm contributing code, and that's something that's actually important to me because I take pride in my work." And that motivation for change, that motivation towards the management of that which was measured, came from inside, opposed to being an externality, of us pushing it on folks. And so that's an example of a successful, "That which gets measured gets managed."
Hunter Powers: And so I do believe a very important caveat to this statement is that you can't actively manage, but you can actively manage towards a metric, but that's not this statement. This statement is that by merely measuring it, it will get managed. Now, I'm also going to give you a counter example of where I've seen it not work, and that's when you measure too many things, you measure everything. Let's just take this idea to its logical conclusion. If that which gets measured gets managed, why don't we measure everything? Then everything will be managed. Everything will push towards some magical equilibrium. But it becomes overwhelming if everything is measured or if there are hundreds of things that are measured.
Hunter Powers: Let's use a real number. If there are 100 things being measured, it becomes too much to manage and you can't work on a hundred different goals at the same time, so everybody, even if they are working on one thing, it doesn't all line up. So I have seen this idea fail, where you take it to its logical conclusion. And so there's some kind of a limit on how many things you can measure. And I'm not going to go into the exacts of what that number should be, but I'll give you guys an intuition.
Hunter Powers: There's another field of management known as OKRs, which stands for "objectives and key results." Objectives and key results are probably most famous for being used at Google, where they give them a lot of credit for their early success, and in the objectives and key results framework, they say three to five objectives, and each objective is measured by a metric. So if you want an intuition about how many things you should be measuring at a given time, with the idea that they implicitly get managed, three to five is about right. And start with one.
Hunter Powers: Of course, this was primarily from a business context, but it applies incredibly well to a personal context. What in your life are you not terribly happy about, that you wish would be better? But, you know, it's just like it's too much work in order to do it, or you've got that bad habit. What if, instead of committing to fixing the habit, you could commit to just measuring the habit? I'm just going to keep a record of it. I'm not going to do anything else right now. Maybe I will, but for right now, what I can make a commitment to is just measuring it. Every day, I'm going to write it down, or every week, I'm going to tally it up and just write it down on this piece of paper, in this document, in this spreadsheet, on a sticky note, whatever works for you, and I'm going to keep it in front of me and I'm going to measure it and I'm going to write it down.
Hunter Powers: And by doing that, you put it to the front of your mind. You will start thinking about it. You will have an internal motivation to move it in the correct direction. So try it out. It's so easy to try out. All you have to do is commit to measuring it. Commit to measuring it on some sort of a regular interval, or some period of time. For three months, you're going to measure it. That's all you're going to do.
Hunter Powers: And if it doesn't work, what have you lost? Almost nothing. And if it does work, what an easy way to get some motivation and get some momentum on something that you've been struggling with, because that which gets measured gets managed. So said Peter Drucker, and that is your One Idea for today. I am Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from our nation's capital, as we say in the city, D.C. proper, and until next time ...