MEASURE
MEASURE is the discipline of seeing what is actually true in a system, rather than what you assume, remember, or hope is true.
It is not reporting
Most businesses are over-reported and under-measured: a chart of accounts with 200 lines and not one number that tells you what to do this week.
Reporting describes. Measurement decides. A page of accurate figures that changes nothing is not a small amount of measurement, it is a different activity wearing the same clothes.
The three parts
- Choose the few numbers that actually drive the system. Those are the Vital Numbers.
- Look at them on a rhythm fast enough to act on.
- Measure effectiveness, not efficiency: output against the goal, not output against input.
Why effectiveness over efficiency
A system can be efficient and dying.
Efficiency asks whether you are doing the thing cheaply. Effectiveness asks whether the thing produces what you actually wanted. Those questions diverge constantly, and the second one is almost always the one that matters.
Common mistake
Measuring more.
The instinct when you feel blind is to add dashboards. Adding measurement without subtracting measurement produces noise, and noise feels like information right up until the moment you need to make a decision with it.
Also in the framework
MEASURE is one of the five framework disciplines. The framework page carries the expanded version with examples, anti-patterns, and lineage.
See framework page →