Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [10]
A metric tells a complete story, fully answering a root question.
If you’ve done a good job with the metric because your charts, graphs, and tables are telling a well-formed story, it will be much harder for misinterpretation. But, it’s still possible. Unless you feel confident that those viewing your metrics don’t have their own agendas, aren’t likely to misinterpret, and are totally open-minded, I highly recommend rounding out the picture with words.
This need for prose is not a new concept. My daughter took an art appreciation class in college. I was not surprised to find that there was a textbook that accompanied the class. Each work of art had pages of text on the artist, some background on why the artist created it, the length of time it took to create it, the medium that was used, and the circumstances behind it becoming relevant. But all this shocked me because when I was in high school, I remember my art teacher explaining how art had no definitive meaning outside the way each viewer interpreted it. This was especially true of modern art (which I still don’t understand). Rather than leave the interpretation to the audience, these textbooks had the all-important explanation of the message behind the painting spelled out right there. Each painting, sculpture, and drawing had one. Each etching, carving, and prehistoric wall-painting had one. An explanation of what the artist was trying to “tell” us with his thousand-word image.
If it’s useful to explain the meaning behind a work of art, how much more necessary is it to capture the meaning of a metric? And wouldn’t it be best to have the meaning explained by the artist herself? This explanation is, of course, an interpretation of the metric. It’s true that if you ask five people to interpret a metric, you may get five different answers—but you’ll want your interpretation to be the one presented with the picture. If metrics are used properly, your interpretation will not be taken as “truth,” but for what it is: one way to view the meaning of the metric.
“Seventy percent of 63 users prefer the ski machine over the stair stepper for the aerobic portion of their exercise program. The wait time for the ski machine is 25 minutes on average. Typically, there is no wait time on the stair steppers. There are 3 ski machines and 12 stair steppers.” This is getting close to being a “good” metric. If a picture (chart or graph) is added, it may get even closer. The goal of the metric is to tell a complete (and useful) story, in response to a root question.
The question is actually the driver of a good metric. You can’t have a good metric without the root question. When we look at our ski machine vs. stair stepper metric, we don’t know the usefulness of the metric because we don’t know what the question is. We can jump to conclusions and worse, we can leap to a potentially regrettable decision.
Should we buy more ski machines? Get rid of some of the stair steppers? Should we make the limit for time on the ski machine less? Should we create an exercise class based on the stair stepper? It should be obvious that the proper answer is not obvious. Part of the confusion may be due to the lack of a question. Why did we collect the data? Why did we do the analysis that led us to the metric? It’s impossible to tell a complete story without a root question.
Root Questions
In my book Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little (Praeger, 2009), my coauthors, Michael Langthorne and Donald Padgett, and I compare metrics to a tree. In this view, the data are the leaves,