Hi guys, Now that I was able to get your attention I must say I believe in measures, do not worry :) I think they are useful but not the way they are used in most of the companies. Typical measures are used to command and control, we must shift this towards an approach where measures are used to give us knowledge about what is going on in the system. In this post, I will explain three principles I found in John Seddon’s book: “Freedom from Command and Control”.
Principle I: The test of a good measure
John refers in his book “A great way to test if a measure is good or not”: “Does this help in understanding and improving of performance?”. “Typical measures of command and control do not pass this test. Measures that are built in order to understand the system will pass the test. Normal targets are arbitrary or random, measures that are derived from work they are concrete.”
Normal targets let people to focus on wrong things, people will focus on simple things that will allow them to survive in the system not allowing them to focus on its improvement. Normal targets do not bring any value in the way they cannot help people to understand the system. On other hand, capabilities measures help to understand and improve the system because they are obtained from the actual work. Like John says: “Targets demotivate while capability measures motivate, because they put control and understanding on the right place”.
Principle II: Measures must relate to purpose
One of the things that many companies forget is to think about the purpose of the company from the customer’s point of view. Usually, companies exist to serve customers, does not matter if internal or external customers, they exist to serve them,therefore, we need to know how well we deliver that purpose. First, we need to know what matters to the customer: speed, reliability, trust or anything else. This will tell us where we should pay our attention and what measures should we set. This approach gives the freedom to people try different methods and experiments to see which one would work better for the customer. This gives a big control to the employee than the traditional command and control approach.
Principle III: Measures must be integrated with work
This is a simple principle. The measures should come out from people who do an actual work, not imposed by a manager who does not have the best picture of what is going on at a lower level. We should help employees to define their “measures” but these measures should be in their hands.
