More than numbers - the mystery of people
"You cannot manage what you cannot measure."
Several people are credited with expressing some variant of this adage. And so we rush to make everything of significance measurable.
The value of art is no longer what it evokes in the observer, but its resale value. Collectors store art in vaults until they can sell it for more than they paid.
People are "resources" to be managed by organizations. We employ assessments to quantify character, surveys that use numbers to express morale, and ticket sales to determine which musicians are worth hearing.
Deep thought alert: When I was studying philosophy there was a perspective called "mind-brain identity theory." Thinkers who didn't want to deal with messy, non-material entities such as souls or minds argued that such things could be replaced by a deeper understanding of the human brain. Emotions, beliefs, feelings, moral commitments would eventually be mapped to specific brain functions and locations.
I do not stand in opposition to numbers or the use of numbers to motivate and manage people, so long as we understand that people, art, faith, and much of what makes life worth living cannot be reduced to numbers without losing something along that path.
There is a mystery to people. I remind my clients that personality assessments are tools that have demonstrated value, but, to take DiSC as an example, when you put seven-plus billion people into quadrants you can have general predictive success without being able to say what any one individual will do at any given moment.
Knowing that you have a dominant (D) personality style may lead me to predict quite successfully your general response to having your competency challenged, but I cannot possibly know how you will respond today at 5:03 PM when that happens.
Early in my current role, I served a team that I declared to be the "healthiest" team I had met. Days after that pronouncement I received a call from one of the team's leaders saying that two team members who were not married to each other had been sleeping together. Very quickly the healthiest team devolved and split apart. Perhaps my surveys and assessments were simply not digging deeply enough or asking all of the relevant questions, but people have this amazing characteristic - the will - that allows them to deceive and to resist attempts at measurement.
Later I dealt with a team that was deciding whether to terminate a team member who had violated company rules. One team leader fought to keep the team member, despite the arguments of others, and today he is a productive, revitalized employee serving in a different role. All the measurable evidence suggested that termination was best, but this leader saw potential in the employee that wasn't captured by any evaluation or numerical assessment.
This irreducibility is particularly clear when we look at human language. The Gettysburg Address is 272 words, took less than three minutes to deliver, and was witnessed by an audience of thousands. Today's State of the Union is thousands of words delivered over the course of 60 minutes and viewed by tens of millions. Which is more impactful? It would be wrong to assume that the shorter speech is always better, but it does suggest that reducing human communication to numbers fails to capture much of what makes it meaningful - tone, delivery, adaptation to setting and audience.
Before you allow the rise of the engineers and management theorists to strip your world of possibility, creativity, and mystery, give us a call. We practice the integration of quantitative and qualitative - numbers and nuance.
2015 is another year of significant growth for Julian Consulting. A recent analysis of our business shows that we are nearing capacity in ongoing coaching and team relationships. At the same time, we are committed to 
