It’s said that if you don’t know where you’re going you won’t know when you get there. It’s also true for improvement that if you don’t know where you started, you won’t know how much progress you’re making.
Measurement is also a way of focusing your attention, and intention, regularly on what you’re improving, why you’re improving, what you’re measuring, and how things are going. Supporting your improvement with measurement helps you take a more structured and disciplined approach, and helps work with other people on improvement and in demonstrating and communicating results.
One type of data is “hard” objective data, measurable with instruments, easily comparable and agreed upon by different people.
What and how you measure doesn’t have to be “hard”. “Soft” measures can be any kind of impression, observation, feeling, strength of belief. These may not be agreed upon by different people, and so they have to be used differently, but they are still importantly and useful.
Consistency is important for all measures — the same people, under similar conditions, using the same methods, similar times of day, etc.
For example, if I want to improve customer relationships, a valid measure could be customer feedback. Often surveys ask whether you would recommend the service to another person, but it would be equally valid and perhaps more useful to ask at various times during the service delivery whether you felt valued and respected.
It’s important to measure for some time before making any changes, to get a solid baseline. Just selecting some things to measure and starting to measure them is a change which could have a positive impact, and you might actually start seeing some improvements without having “done” anything.
There is a lot more to be said about measurement, and it varies depending on the area to be improved, but let’s get started with measuring your baseline.
For your improvement area, review your criteria for judging whether it’s better than it was. For each criterion, consider how you will measure, and set up a simple system to measure this daily or weekly (depending on the measure and your time frame). For example, if I want to improve my sleep, I might start by noting my lights-out time, estimated sleep duration, and how rested I feel in the morning.
Get going with measurement, and try to do it at the same time of the day/week. Do keep track of any ideas you have about how to improve the measurement system, and also about how to improve your performance. I am suggesting not making any changes until you set a baseline of at least 6 measurements.
If you do make a change, make sure you keep track of what you’re changing and why. A goal here is not only to improve, but to learn about improvement and learning.
About Learning
You could just read all these posts in a few minutes each. I suggest that 90% of the value is in the exercises. It’s only when ideas are applied and adopted are they contributing to a better life. Think about it and do what will give you the results you want and need.
References
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