You can manage many things without measuring them

There is a common saying that “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Many people mistakenly think the reverse is true, that if they can measure it, or something they call “it,” they can manage it. What they ignore is an old lesson from some of the greatest scientists—just because you can obtain numbers from measuring some key performance indicator does not mean the thing you think you are measuring actually exists. What then are you managing? Businesses measure and create all sorts of performance indicators without asking whether they indicate what they think they indicate. Often they do not.

People manage most aspects of their lives without recourse to measurement, whether it is their child’s struggles at school, their relationship with their spouses or their boss, or their choice of wines. My piano tuner, like many piano tuners, tunes our baby grand piano beautifully and very precisely without measuring anything, relying only on his acute sense of hearing and his musical skills. Entrepreneurs launch great new business ventures on hunches and their own vision without measurement; great leaders have inspired their followers to untold feats without measurement.

Peter Drucker said that managers should distinguish between the measurable and the unmeasurable. It is a mistake to rely too heavily on quantification and overlook vital, but unmeasurable, information. Few business people do this deliberately. They carefully spell out what they want to measure and do not ask themselves to what unmeasurable information they should be paying attention. 

Lord Kelvin’s said in 1883 “I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind….”  People wrongly interpret that comment to mean “if you cannot measure it, you are ignorant”.

But it is not what Lord Kelvin meant. False interpretation of his remark has caused a lot of damage. Lord Kelvin knew that you have to be very careful about what inferences or conclusions you can draw from measurements. He knew that you cannot infer the thing you think you are measuring actually exists just because you obtain numbers from measuring what you presume to be that thing.  A measurement is not proof of some underlying property of the thing you are measuring. If such a property exists, however, Kelvin thought you must measure it to gain a satisfactory knowledge of it. Likewise, you cannot make an inference about something based on a measurement, if that thing does not actually exist, or does not exist in the form you imagine it to exist.

Measurement plays a crucial role in management. But be careful of not following into the trap of thinking that just because you can measure something you can manage it, whatever “it” is.