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If I never hear a manager utter “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” again, it’ll be too soon. It’s one thing to suffer from a blinkered, reductive v
by shermantanktop 2y ago
If I never hear a manager utter “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” again, it’ll be too soon.
It’s one thing to suffer from a blinkered, reductive view of the world. It’s another thing to be proud of it.
- BurningFrog 2y agoWhats are some ways to manage unmeasurable things?
- dghlsakjg 2y agoEmpathy, trust, and experience.
- tmpz22 2y agoLeadership, humility, kindness
- nier 2y agoCoherence, balance, taste.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoone, two, three
- Almondsetat 2y agoLive, laugh, love
- lazystar 2y agoby having a vision of an ideal future
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- piuantiderp 2y agoActual intelligence. The measurable is always, once you have your number, make it go up!!!!!!!
- glimshe 2y agoIntuition and experience-based decision making. Team member says they are feeling less creative because their kid is having bullying problems in school. "Can't measure the creativity, can't measure the bullying... Can't manage this situation, sorry"
- dyauspitr 2y agoThat’s also the kind of stuff I always hear from people that love to shoot from the hip and trust their gut feel. The results those people have is invariably inconsistent, there’s no way to scale any of their knowledge and honestly at the end of the day it’s just a person reacting to a situation.
- dwb 2y agoYou assume there is a way to scale certain kinds of knowledge, or that the current metrics-supremacy is it. I get it, humans are inconsistent and squishy, but at least we can be reasoned with. Stripping complex realities down to “metrics”, often without error bars even, gives fake authority to dangerous approximations. You can’t argue with numbers! They’re so precise and correct.
- 9dev 2y agoDiscussions like these always feel too reductive to me. Both of you take extremist positions, when I’m sure you do both agree that the proper approach is obviously a middleground: Strive to gather objective numbers and measure things as much as possible to become able to make factual decisions, but don’t disregard human intuition just because it’s not measurable; after all, it’s a tool shaped by millions of years of evolution, culminating in creatures ruling the world due to their ability to assess social contexts correctly. To put it differently—measure what you can; trust your feelings on the rest.
- glimshe 2y ago"Measure what you can" isn't the right approach. You can measure many, many things. Instead, you should measure things whenever they are good proxies for the outcomes you want to drive AND there is good cost benefit in measuring+analyzing them. Surprisingly few things meet these criteria.
- roenxi 2y agoWhat alternative do you see? At the end of the day it is philosophically impossible to manage situations that cannot be detected. It is like the OODA loop to catch a ghost; the ghost can't be observed because it doesn't exist and the ODA part becomes a questionable exercise. Managers who react to known signals in predictable ways are strategically better than managers who just make stuff up on the day in unpredictable ways.
- srinivgp 2y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Paperbacks-dp-0300246757/dp/0300246757/ https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Paperback... The alternative is to do the thing that doesn't scale, because all the purported ways of scaling are worse than that.
- tyre 2y agoAs a manager, there is diminishing returns to measurements. At a certain point, you have to trust the team to do the right thing without having full documentation, specification, and provable outcomes. Many of the most important decisions do not have quantifiable outcomes. How many incidents did this architecture or refactor prevent? What cultural effect would that person we didn’t hire have had over the next year? At least in early stage or growing startups, I think if every one of your actions is measurable and fully specced, you’re in trouble.
- roenxi 2y ago> At a certain point, you have to trust the team to do the right thing... Yeah, but that is explicitly not managing them. That is the standard "I can't measure this situation, therefore I will not attempt to manage it" response of a good manager.
- hashishen 2y agoYou are not perfect though. There will always be factors overlooked and simply acknowledging that before it becomes a problem is something most management has failed to grasp which is what motivates this sentiment. I can bet now often than not on this thread alone now people have felt the negative effects of every action being quantified for the sake of 'profitability' by someone who lacks a firm grasp on the field being measured, which leads to high performing employees being let go.
- spencerchubb 2y agoif a metric is too simple, choose better metrics! don't throw away metrics altogether
- whaaaaat 2y agoThe reverse is also true though -- hearing from folks that we need to measure nothing because "trust me". Both lead to poor outcomes, ime. A good engineering team has measurements in place that are reasonable approximations, where it is reasonable to build them, but also treats them as prompts rather than absolutes. Asking "why is this metric out of band?" is infinitely more valuable than stating "this metric is out of band, we've failed".
- whatshisface 2y agoOut of band means communicated on different channels than ordinary information. For example a metric communicated out of band would be told to you in person instead of showing up on your universal agent smith react widget dashboard. :-)
- shermantanktop 2y agoTwo different jargon phrases overlapping here, as I’m sure you know. Yours is “out of communication band” whereas GP is “out of predictive band.” Yours is a bit more common to me, but I hear both.
- eecc 2y agoThe latter should be “out of scale” (think 3.6 Roentgen…) “out of band” is quite literally outside the prescribed channel.
- magicalhippo 2y agoAnd the band could be the expected value range, as is commonly shown on many gauges by having a section colored.
- nmstoker 2y agoThere's no language rule that a phrase can have only one meaning. You seem to be taking this too precisely, as the earlier explanations of there being two interpretations are quite entirely reasonable.
- maxrf 2y agoIt's also "you manage what you measure" - measure the wrong stuff ... I agree with empathy and 'EQ', better still if we can measure the outcomes we really want (vs the easy ones). That requires knowledge and insight.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt makes sense if the goal is "maximise the pay of managers".
- shermantanktop 2y agoThe shenanigans I have seen… Given a choice between two metrics, managers will usually choose the most gameable, indirect, activity-oriented metric, even if it is far less useful for driving results. And I can’t blame them. That’s the game. They have to make a number go up, their boss also has numbers that need to go up, and so on. In the worst cases, everyone is complicit in creating a forest of bullshit numbers that went up even while the company tanked.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]