Good numbers don’t mean you’re good
For this blog, we’re going to start with a quiz! The answer will be at the end.
During the First World War, the Army replaced all the soldiers’ cloth caps with tin helmets. The injury rate of those soldiers actually went up by quite a long way… What was the reason?
What we measure
Statistics may be one of our most effective and efficient vehicles for communicating information. It is natural for people to trust numbers over words, because statistics present numbers in an attractive format that everyone can follow. In addition, numbers represent a wide variety of information – including election poll numbers, service level agreements & KPIs, net promoter scores, football results, engagement surveys, the retail price index …or of course profit.
This perception of reliability in the data is risky. Looking at our children’s school grades to the cost of the Tokyo Olympics to the percentage of trains that run on time – what that data doesn’t tell us is how much our children are learning, how good the Olympics will be, or the quality of the customer’s journey on those trains!
The problem with the numbers
The problems come when the data used to represent the outcome, becomes the outcome. The numbers are not the means to the end. Happy customers are the means to the end – the customer feedback scores are a representation of that means! It drives me nuts that organisations focus so much time and effort on getting good feedback scores, rather than focusing that effort on just making them happy.
Another story is that of our old favourites – traffic wardens. For many years now, local press around the UK has been reporting that traffic wardens have been giving out bogus tickets because they have to fulfil a certain quota of tickets per hour. Anything from buses, police cars and even tow trucks have been ticketed – but I don’t believe that it’s the traffic warden’s fault… If you were working in a culture that actually defined your success in your job by the amount of tickets you gave (and docked your wages if you didn’t meet that target), what would you do?
What difference would it make to the traffic wardens if their success was defined as the lowest number of disputes? What if success was defined by the greatest number of people re-educated with not having to give a ticket? What if a traffic warden was rewarded for having to give out the least number of tickets (because people in their ‘patch’ parked properly?) How would that change their approach?
The trouble with focussing on the numbers is not the numbers. It’s the focus. In the gym you can focus on the number of calories you burn, or you can focus on your quality of health. On Twitter, you can focus on the number of followers you have, or on the quality of those relationships. At work, you can focus on your call abandon rate, meeting room utilisation, profitability or KPI adherence. Or you can focus on delivering an awesome service for each and every person and let the numbers take care of themselves!
And the solution to my riddle? The number of injuries of those soldiers did indeed go up – but the number of deaths from head injuries went right down, saving thousands of lives. The piece of shrapnel would have previously killed them outright.
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