But Measure you must!!

Lord Kelvin is the guy responsible for telling me whether I have a high fever or low. He invented the temperature measuring scale.

Lord Kelvin said over a hundred years ago:

 "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind..."

Expressed in modern day English, it simply means "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it'.

We all set goals for ourselves and hope to excel at achieving these. I realize that I think of too many important matters in mere Qualitative terms and then hope to do better at them. With qualitative descriptors, my thinking gets muddled up.

-          Am I more punctual in responding to people than I was before?

-          Is my track running performance better than it was last year?

-          Am I playing my favorite musical instrument better now that I have practiced for a year?

-          Am I communicating better in the foreign language that I learnt, than when I began?

I am aware that we all measure these goals in some number formats or other. However to make any kind of judgment about ourselves we need more than just isolated numbers.
 
If I measure my performance on a 100 meter track on 20 days, the stopwatch tells me that I am good on some days and not good on others. Does it mean that the workout schedule I follow has had a positive impact? I am not sure. To be certain, I will need to compare measures across two horizons of time in the following terms:

1.       Shift in baseline of the performance measure.

2.       Consistency of performance across measures.

To measure performance, I need a single number that will tell me in no uncertain terms that improvement has taken place.

What I write about personal goals applies to corporate goals too, and a single number that gives you a clear mandate on improvement would be of great value, in performance measures, appraisals et al.

A few years ago I had studied the work done by Genichi Taguchi, the eminent Japanese engineer and statistician. His metric of Signal-to-Noise Ratio seems to be the single number that I am looking for. I am going to write about how the S/N ratio metric could be used to gauge sports performance improvement. Watch this space.

Measure you may more correctly than others, measure you may not so correctly, but measure you must!