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BurningFrog

Whats are some ways to manage unmeasurable things?

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Intuition 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"

That’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.

You 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.

Discussions 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.

"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.

Of course I agree that the right thing is some sort of middle ground, of roughly what you lay out. But the current hegemonic position is that of metrics-supremacy, so I feel I have to argue most strongly against that to get us to that middle ground.

When you argue like that, that’s what’s generally referred to as “pushing an agenda” and people sour to it quickly. You’re better off sticking to your actual argument than embellishing things.

I'm not embellishing anything, I'm making my "actual" arguments. I've never argued against seeking a sensible middle-ground. I've said elsewhere that metrics have their place.

The world isn't black or white, zero or one. The main problem with metrics-centric management is that its proponents try to reduce everything to metrics.

I was simply pointing out that many situations can't be solved through metrics. In my experience, the best managers try to solve most problems without metrics, but always insist on them in places where they are valuable.

In other words, they use metrics as a tool and make metrics work for the team instead of the team work for the metrics.

Empathy, trust, and experience.

Leadership, humility, kindness

Coherence, balance, taste.

one, two, three

Live, laugh, love

by having a vision of an ideal future

Actual intelligence. The measurable is always, once you have your number, make it go up!!!!!!!

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