Aperture Book of the Month - October 2024

Despite the huge variety of opinions about how to develop strategy and plans, much less attention is paid to the manner in which it is best monitored and executed. We have written elsewhere about how conventional wisdom is severely limited in this area (consider the dangers of ‘SMART’ metrics, for example) and our Book of the Month for October explores the problem in some detail. Professor Jerry Muller’s ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ accepts that there are many instances where metrics have proven useful, but also warns strongly against the direct application of excessive and inappropriate measurement.  

Muller argues that many approaches to measurement are counter-productive. Often, despite the best intentions, metrics influence behaviour, rather than the other way around, and the numbers become short-termist and the focus of production; more intangible factors are difficult to measure and are therefore overlooked. Goals become displaced through diversion of effort into what can be measured. Creativity and innovation risk being stifled as behaviour trends toward conformity, and employees can grow to resent their contribution being measured only by numerical targets.

Metrics can also provide false representation, whilst creating an assumption of certainty. Not only do they trend to measuring the simple when the desired output is complex, or inputs rather than outputs, but they are vulnerable to ‘gaming’ or even corrupt practice, particularly if they are used to inform remuneration or reward. Muller presents examples from education, law enforcement, the military, and medical services, prominent amongst which is, of course, the management disaster that was Robert McNamara’s contribution to the Vietnam War. Faced with all this accumulated evidence, why do we then persist in purely quantitative methods of measurement. Is this another reason why strategy fai

ls so often?   

Metrics and measurement certainly have their place and can be valuable if developed and used in context. Critically, they should be used to inform judgement rather than regulate or even devalue a broader perspective. Aperture’s ‘Four Frames’ methodology for strategy design and implementation focuses on exactly this approach, seamlessly integrating strategic design with execution for agility and resilience, based on assessment rather than measurement, and recognising th both subjective and objective review.

Muller asserts that, ‘A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply’.  We couldn’t agree more.