What Gets Measured Gets Done

Episode 3: What Gets Measured Gets Done

[00:00:00] James: hello, I’m James.

[00:00:04] Jimmy: Hi, I’m Jimmy.

[00:00:05] James: Welcome to A Job Done Well,

[00:00:08] Jimmy: The podcast about the world of work and how to improve the daily grind.

Well, James, how has your week been?

[00:00:15] James: . I’m a man of a certain age, I had to go and see my doctor. So I go and see my GP, and here I am. You know, I’m not feeling too great. I think I am the centre of this GP’s world. And after ten minutes, she looks at me and she says, Right, your ten minutes are up, you can go now. I felt fantastic about the whole experience.

[00:00:32] Jimmy: Today’s episode is… What gets measured gets done. We can figure out what your GP is being measured on there , do you wanna ask me how my week’s been? I know it’s all about you

[00:00:48] James: what

[00:00:49] Jimmy: Thanks James, well spent a lot of time decorating our downstairs toilet Which is definitely way out of my comfort zone. I’ve completed it , , I’ve ticked a box, but it hasn’t been quality checked yet. So, once my other half quality checks and points out all the things I’ve done wrong, then we can declare satisfaction on that project and move on with our lives and get decorators back next time.

Anything needs painting .

[00:01:10] James: Yeah, but what she doesn’t know, , is that I went to the downstairs bathroom, , it was wet, so I’ve got my fingerprints on the door, and that little secret is out now, so you’re going to have to do that again.

Yeah,

Right then We’re going to talk about measures and targets today . Here’s a little horror story, something , I heard the other day. During the 1980s, I think it was, there was a school inspection went on. And the school inspector was sitting in the back of the class, and the teacher’s teaching away.

And when she asked a question, all the kids stuck their hands up in the air. And then the. The teacher picked on one of the children to answer the question. And of course the inspector went away thinking everything’s rosy. , apparently what happened was that before the inspector came in, the teacher said to the children, Right, we’ve got an inspector coming in today, I’m going to ask you some questions.

If you know the answer to the question, stick your right hand in the air. And if you don’t know the answer to the question, stick your left hand into the air. So, there’s a thought for you. It’s not really about education at all. It’s all about passing the school inspection.

[00:02:14] Jimmy: Measures, measures are everywhere. They impact your life all the time. How you’re treated in that restaurant quite often will depend on what’s being measured . How you’re, experiencing a shop, how long you queue up for, that also could depend on what’s being measured within that shop.

It’s just everywhere, all the time. When you go into places and people are trying to sell you things, their sales targets are driving their behaviors. .

Another good one that I was reading the other day in Men’s Health Magazine.

[00:02:42] James: all right

[00:02:44] Jimmy: How long should you be having sex for? Apparently, 7 to 13 minutes. Is the optimal amount of time. So it’s all about time. Not about quality, all about time. So like I say, today’s episode, What Gets Measured,Gets Done.

[00:02:59] James: That is not a conversation we’re going to pursue further on this podcast.

[00:03:02] Jimmy: Definitely not, definitely not.

Anyhow, Today, what we are going to pursue is why, why measures are important,, how you use measures, measures versus targets,

[00:03:15] James: Measures versus targets, one of my favorite subjects. , Goodhart’s Law, have you ever heard of Charles Goodhart? No, I don’t suppose you have, have you? Right, so Charles Goodhart was an, I think he was an economist, , in the 1970s or 80s. And he was really critical of Margaret Thatcher’s government. And he came up with this thing, which he wrote down, which was…

? Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

[00:03:43] Jimmy: What the fuck?

[00:03:44] James: Yeah, so what that means is, that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, people cheat.

[00:03:51] Jimmy: That’s a fair point, James. People do cheat a great example that’s in the news at the moment. , we’ve got the COVID inquiry going on and I’m sure one of the things will come out in that will be about the whole testing strategy that we had early on in COVID.

[00:04:05] James: Yeah.

[00:04:06] Jimmy: And, , if you remember, there were setting targets for how many tests were going to be done each day and, , they were just completely obsessed and focused about hitting this.

And then you dig into it a little bit and you realize it’s not how many tests are done. It’s how many they’ve dispatched. they were holding them back, putting them forward, just trying to do it, manipulate it to try and hit the number that Matt Hancock had called out. the other thing that the, uh, that will come out in COVID inquiry is also tension between the measures that the different ministers had.

So Hancock had measures around health, covid rates, things like that, where as Rishi Sunack clearly had measures around the economy.What is COVID, right? So, again the different tensions, t that measures create Word where

[00:05:02] James: Well there is also that thing with that one where they couldn’t decide, What So if somebody died in a care home, it wasn’t counted, whereas if they died somewhere else, it was. So, yeah, again, a right mess.

 [00:05:15] James: Now I know it’s a little bit nuanced, difference between a measure and a target, but it really is a big deal. So a measure, in my mind, is something which tells you how you are progressing against something that you want to achieve, and if you’re not progressing as much as you want, well then there’s a question about what’s getting in your way and what can you do about it.

Whereas a target is absolute. When people start talking about targets, then all of a sudden you’ve got a dose of success or failure, and of course that drives a whole host of different behaviours because nobody wants to fail. And the problem is that most managers are incapable of looking at a measure without asking, well, what’s the target?

And then the other thing, of course, is that we’re very good at measuring the things which we can get our hands around the numbers really easily, but the things which are maybe much more important, which we can’t get the data for, we don’t focus on. So a classic example of this, if you ever worked in a call center, is people will obsess about the numbers which are easy to get .

So average handle time and abandon rates and average speed of answers and a whole host of different measures. But the really important thing in a call center, well, we would hope the really important thing in a call center, is did the agent resolve the customer’s query?

And that’s not so easy to get hold of, and consequently not so many call centers worry about providing that piece of information, let alone targeting it.

[00:06:34] Jimmy: Yeah, let’s, let’s measure how long you’re on the phone. Easy to measure, not what you’re actually , they’re trying to do.

Or, as you’d rightly say, James, measure loads of things. I mean, I’ve been involved in lots of discussions in organizations, on boards , where let’s, let’s measure everything.

Let’s get every angle covered. And then you can’t see the wood for the trees.

[00:06:54] James: Oh yeah and one of my favourite things that really winds me up is the way that they are presented, so they shove everything onto a pile of graphs a thousand different colours, i mean its a bit crude but it looks like somebody has vomited on a powerpoint, its dreadful,

[00:07:08] Jimmy: yeah, there are a number of people who’ve worked for me in the past who’ll tell you if you make a, a graph colourful, , I’m there, I’m, won over.

[00:07:15] James: Right anyway as the head of colouring in lets move on. , ,

[00:07:19] Jimmy: really important to, , link your measures to purpose. Last week we talked about the importance of purpose. The measures really help you understand your progress towards delivering on that purpose.

 A great example , of how that can play out in real life. , we were talking earlier, James, about…

Deliveries and, we’ve got a few deliveries coming to our house today and, you know, there’ll be a very different experience whether you have your delivery company like Every,

[00:07:49] James: company em hum

[00:07:50] Jimmy: who , their purpose is clear to be very, very cheap. Um, not so cheerful, but definitely cheap.

[00:07:56] James: Sorry I’ve got to cut in, I got a delivery from every the other day. They sent me the photograph of my house. It wasn’t my house. I had to walk, I think it was about eight houses down the street to find my parcel. Anyway, moving on before I start ranting about everything.

[00:08:09] Jimmy: But equally, we’ll get a load of stuff delivered by DPD who clearly are more interested in, do they deliver it to the right people? Do you have a good experience with them? You know, it’s a completely different way of doing things, but both , are driven from the purpose of their company.

 [00:08:29] James: Yeah, interesting, isn’t it? I wonder which one of those organizations will make the most money in the long term. But I think for me, the point is there, it’s really pointless jumping up and down on people’s heads when the measure doesn’t necessarily become what it wants to be. I heard a really interesting story about FedEx the other day, and they apparently have improved their effectiveness.

and made their deliveries much faster. And what they did, I need to get this the right way around, so based in the States, where they all drive on the right hand side, is they designed their routes so that their routes were, , clockwise, so they were always turning right as they go around the route.

And obviously, because they drive on the right and they’re turning right, they

don’t have to cross the traffic. And because they don’t have to cross the traffic, they can get around their route quicker. So that was quite interesting. Presumably, they’ve instigated the same in the UK, but turning left.

[00:09:18] Jimmy: So how should you do it?

How should you design your your measures for your purpose?

[00:09:23] James: Well, I think the really important thing is to,

Start off by being clear what your purpose is. One we talked about last week,

 Was Netflix, and their purpose statement was something of our purpose is to, , entertain people no matter where you live or whatever your tastes are.

And once you understand that, then the question is, well, did we entertain you? Yes or no. And where did you live? Have we got that covered? And what was your tastes? . So once you’ve got the mind around that, then you can design your system to improve those measures.

[00:09:55] Jimmy: that, gets us into , one of our favorite discussions where. We, , agree to disagree. , what’s most important, the system or the people? , the point being, you you really need to understand the drivers of your measures,

[00:10:09] James: but they do say don’t they that a bad. We, uh, The system will be a good person every time. But then I I?

[00:10:16] Jimmy: yeah, you say that, James. I’m not sure who that is other than you.

[00:10:20] James: Yeah, so an interesting example of that is my point about my doctor earlier on. . . So there she is busily trying to make sure she sees everybody within 10 minutes. But is 10 minutes long enough?

But what, obviously what really happens is that the doctor cuts the appointment short.

A couple of very easy ways to do that. Give the patient some paracetamol and tell them to come back next week when they can have another 10 minutes. Or , send them on to the hospital when they really don’t need to be going to the hospital. I mean, it’s a classic example of hitting the target but missing the point.

[00:10:47] Jimmy: .Yeah and exactly and in that case almost the target the ten minutes has become the purpose where as actually the doctors there to, you know, cure illnesses, not see patients within 10 minutes.

[00:10:59] James: I couldn’t I couldn’t agree more. Anyway, so where have you seen measures used well?

[00:11:03] Jimmy: Well, to be honest, not to, , blow my own trumpet in one of the previous organizations I worked at,,. We were there to, to really help customers when they, they were in trouble. And the organization had lost its way a little bit , and they weren’t really clear on their purpose.

Anyhow, we refocused the organization on helping customers. And, out of that, we understood how satisfied customers were. We had a simple set of measures, of which, , customer satisfaction was, key for us. So did people walk away from this organization feeling they’d had a good experience? And,  Then we lined everyone up behind delivering on that. So people really understood what the overall purpose was. What the measures were , and everyone was engaged in trying to deliver on that. We had people who were talking to customers, who obviously were focused on it, but also people who were there to help them and make the processes easier and help them do their jobs better.

So it became a really collaborative effort to try and deliver on this customer satisfaction measure. , over a period of time, we saw it go from , the low fifties to the high eighties.

[00:12:13] James: . So there you go. The really interesting part there is that you didn’t target the individuals, , .

What you did was you had a team target and everybody looked at that.

[00:12:20] Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely.

inTeresting enough, like you say, everyone looked at overall customer satisfaction. Everyone understood the part they played towards delivery of that. . And that’s how people earned , their bonuses at the end of the year. It was how the organization performed, not how they individually performed.

[00:12:37] James: Uh, so you didn’t make it in their interest to game the system then?

[00:12:40] Jimmy: collaborative, not com competitive. Very good. Um, and

[00:12:43] James: Yeah, very good. , and then the other thing about targets versus measures is when you’ve got a target, it can become really binary. So you either hit the target or you didn’t. Now there’s this horror story about ambulances and breaches.

I don’t know how true this is, but maybe it’s an urban myth.

But apparently, 75 percent of ambulances have to arrive at certain incidents within eight minutes, depending on how severe the incident is.

But what I’ve heard, , is that, if an ambulance isn’t going to get there in eight minutes, and something else happens, what the dispatchers will do is, thing. Well, that one’s breach. We’re not good at the target with that one. And then we’ll send the ambulance somewhere else instead.

So once you’ve breached, you can wait around hours for the ambulance to arrive. So there you go. And example of binary targets.

[00:13:30] Jimmy: And you can often see that in, in you know, if you’ve then hit the target, ease off. why would you exceed it by too much, you know, put some in the bank for, for next year?

[00:13:42] James: Arh, now on the subject of banks there is all this stuff in the news about governments changing legislation so bankers targets aren’t capped? go on tell me what do you think of that one

What do you think of that one,

[00:13:53] Jimmy: Well, that’s a whole episode on its own, but , , the thing that I’d be most concerned with, what are you targeting them with? Because as we’re discussing today, what gets measured gets done.

[00:14:03] James: Yeah, and that really, I suppose, begs the question, should the target be 100 percent or 0%? Because actually, coming back to my ambulance one, I don’t want to be 75 percent you’re here in eight minutes. I want to be 100 percent you’re here in eight minutes.

[00:14:17] Jimmy: think that’s a good example, though, of aspiration versus target. I mean, you might want to have an aspiration that’s to get there in 100 percent in eight minutes. But, , setting a target of that is probably going to be unrealistic and again drive, , the wrong sort of behavior.

[00:14:34] James: Yeah, absolutely.

Then another thing, right? How many measures do you need? So I work for an organization for a while, I was responsible for management information there and we produced a monthly MIPAC and it ran to 170 pages. And each one of those pages probably had three or four different graphs and pieces of information and commentary on it. I’m thinking, does anybody actually read this 170 pages? There’s a chap called, oh there was a chap, bless him he’s dead now, called Russell Ackoff. And he, , had this phrase, which was, the less managers understand the business, the more variables they require to explain it. So there was almost that thing about more is more, but you really don’t understand what’s going on.

. And then you add on to that all these systems which can now, generate thousands of different metrics in different meanings, yeah. And you.

Drag it all into a meeting. And it really doesn’t help you. So what does a good set of measures look like? Well, first of all, have you really got the critical few? Do you understand what they are? And do they link to purpose? And then, could you please present them in a nice, clear, easy to interpret way?,

[00:15:38] Jimmy: have you use measures becomes important. And, you know, we’ve talked about,

, using them with targets, and how they drive behaviours, but also… How do you as, as leaders actually use those measures? So , if you are coaching improvement, you’ll get one outcome.

If you are beating with a stick, you’ll get a completely different that

[00:16:02] James: I’ve worked for a guy who was a great combination of bully and idiot all rolled into one, but I remember we were discussing a project, and I said that we could achieve such and such per cent of our target. , and he said to me, So, James, can you guarantee that you will achieve that in every area that you look at?

And I looked at him and said, Well, I’m afraid I can’t. , because every area is different, but we will give it our best shot. And he said, No, James, you don’t understand. Can you achieve that? Yes, or yes. And then he started banging the table. . And, , after I walked out of that, you can imagine it was a bit dazed, but I made sure that I told him we’d hit the target.

Whether we had or not is a different matter altogether.

[00:16:43] Jimmy: That is a great example of lazy management, . a target and then just shout a lot until you get that target delivered. Whereas actually, real skilled leaders, have a set of measures that they know, , are linked into their purpose, and they will help and coach their teams to improve.

[00:17:01] James: Absolutely. That’s a great phrase, isn’t it? . Deming quote, a target without method is cruel.

[00:17:08] Jimmy: So in summary link your measures to a purpose. That’s like a purpose, understand the drivers, is it the system, is it the people?

[00:17:17] James: It’s always the system,

[00:17:18] Jimmy: Of course, of course. Don’t jump to conclusions, James. Know that the, uh, the numbers affect behaviours, so what gets measured will get done, and the way you use the measures will really supercharge the behaviours that you actually see.

[00:17:34] James: Yeah, and most of all, when you’re using your measures, don’t give people a reason to cheat, because they will,

[00:17:40] Jimmy: you always like to have the last word, don’t you, James?

[00:17:43] James: Absolutely I do I never get it at home

[00:17:45] Jimmy: It was my job to summarize, not yours.

Anyhow, what you don’t know is we’ve got a question from last week. , the episode that we did on purpose. We’ve got a question from Adrian in the Peak District. How do you go about creating a purpose statement? What? think there’s a few things, uh, give yourself the space to think, make sure it’s a collaborative effort. So it’s not a solo thing. If you’re doing it as a, you know, for an organization, involve the organization. If you’re doing it with a team, involve the team, link it to what’s existing. So if you’re a team in a big organization, understand what’s already there in terms of the company’s direction.

Watch for wordsmithing, try and avoid too much corporate bullshit, because you really want people to be motivated to deliver, and it’s a very small minority of people that are motivated by corporate bullshit. , and try it out.

 , try it out on people, see what reaction you get.

[00:18:46] James: Yeah. And also, sense check it against things we talked about last time. So, is it customer focused?

Because if your purpose isn’t customer focused, then it isn’t a good purpose. Is it engaging? Will your employees really care about it? Because you want them to help deliver it. And make sure it’s measurable and actionable. ​

[00:19:05] Jimmy: And

then once you’ve done all that, make sure you share it and , really build belief.

 We should give some thanks to, , a number of our listeners, friends and family who have, , been, , testing out this podcast. They’ve given us quite a lot of feedback, which will help us on our quest to continue to improve the output. We’re giving you all,

[00:19:25] James: Yeah  and  go on what was the feedback,

I can guess,

[00:19:26] Jimmy: well, the feedback was really good.

The feedback was really good. , two things I’d pull out. One was everyone was, , very surprised at the quality, which I think was a backhanded, compliment. the other thing was that somebody had suggested that it should be renamed the, , the Boffin and the Baraboy.

[00:19:41] James: I can imagine which one’s which. done all that, you and send us some questions

Depending on the quality of answer you want, you either need to send that to jimmy at ajobdonewell. com or alternatively james at ajobdonewell. com. Anyway, I hope you have a super week.

[00:20:05] Jimmy: Thanks everyone. Have a great week.

[00:20:06] James: Cheers now.