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December 12, 2006

How Much Is Enough?

Our colleague Charles H. Green at Trusted Advisor helps to reinforce some strong themes found around here in his comment on the very recent Archestra post, "Performance Recap".

One of his points is that measurement is probably overrated as a prerequisite for management. Enjoy his examples as soon as you can, but here I'll add a few more points to continue both the recap and the line of thought.

How can we define measurement, management and performance simply enough to see their absolute difference from each other but just as easily see how they might relate?

A simple version of that is as follows:
- measurement is a form of description that intends to identify a relative state.
- performance is a describable effect , of an effort that intends to create progress towards a target state.
- management is a form of influence that intends to establish a relative orderliness.

Measurement doesn't cause orderliness; it merely can support orderliness by giving management some grounds for a model of orderliness to pursue. But management can easily use other sources to develop models. Interestingly, though, it is hard to imagine any source of a model that does not essentially require description, so the difference is most likely in the forms of description that are used to assert the basis of the model. Gossip, for example, can be posed as an alternative to measurement. Plenty of people model their efforts to influence things, by relying on gossip.

And performance -- well, it can be "good" or "bad" or somewhere along that spectrum. The point is that it is not necessarily either, and the notion of performance requires only the ability to identify where the effect of effort fits relative to the ambition associated with the effort. Interestingly, this helps to point out that the actual effectiveness of an effort might be strong, but if that "effectiveness" isn't of the right flavor, it won't in most cases be evaluated as "good performance"...

As for management: we most often work under the assumption that some kind of orderliness, in our environment and/or our effort, is more likely to result in progress from our effort. Yet in art, in learning (not "teaching"), and in play, we also know that this orderliness might be very slight and it might not even be from a desirable mode of influence -- to wit, "the method in the madness" -- yet progress is actually just as intentional, plentiful and expected as it is in any routinely "managed" work of other kinds.

What Charles Green (and much of the thought on Archestra as well) points out is that management can influence progress without being concerned about measurement.

On the other hand, it's quite difficult to use the notion of performance without using measurement. Here, the real issue is not whether measurement is involved, but rather what kind of measurement is involved.

Having responsibility for progress creates too much anxiety for us to get relaxed about having "unmeasured progress" -- and yet unmeasured progress happens all the time -- both with and without management. We just don't want to take the chance, normally, that desirable progress will occur without management, and then we use measurement to prove that the management effort being made is worth the trouble.

So, having reached that punchline, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with liking measurement. It's one way that we can try to increase the amount of time we spend being both lucky and smart. This doesn't mean that other ways, such as relationship building and collaboration, wouldn't be just as helpful or even moreso. That's also management at work, and it probably has a much longer history of practice and success. Let's call in some high-performance historians and check it out, when we can.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 12, 2006 11:38 AM

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Comments

Malcolm,

Well said. I particularly like your treatment of "description," that seems to me quite right and useful.

Posted by: Charles H. Green at December 12, 2006 2:02 PM

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