Why We Can't Measure Innovation, Culture or Quality?
Hiệp hội Quản Trị Nguồn Nhân Lực (Human Capital Management Group)
Why We Can't Measure Innovation, Culture or Quality?
When many people start out looking for good KPIs and performance measures, they don't realize that their opening question is a big part of the problem they have finding those good measures. They'll ask, 'how do you measure innovation?' Or 'how do you measure culture?' They're asking how to measure broad concepts, and that's the problem.
We can't measure broad concepts. We can only measure specific attributes about those concepts. That's because most concepts are too complex to summarize with one or two universal measures.
You can't measure innovation.
Do you want to measure innovation? Don't bother trying. You'll just brainstorm a bunch of useless quasi-measures. To find meaningful measures, you need to decide what attributes about innovation you want to change or improve or achieve. These might be:
- The
size of the business benefit of innovations
- The
ROI of innovations
- The
speed of getting innovations implemented
- The
frequency of generating innovations worth testing
- The extent of the workforce involved in innovation
If innovation is important to your organization, has anyone taken the time to flesh out what attributes of innovation are strategically important?
You
can't measure corporate culture.
And how do you measure corporate culture? You don't. You measure attributes of corporate culture. You measure the attributes that you want to change about the corporate culture. These might include (and there are many more):
- How
often people learn from mistakes
- How
well diversity is tolerated
- How
widely continuous improvement is practiced
- How
much collaboration happens spontaneously
- How
quickly people adapt to change
- What attributes of corporate culture matter most
right now in your organization?
You
can't measure service quality.
Service quality isn't measurable, either. You must measure attributes about service quality, because it's too complex to condense into a single measure. You might be thinking that Average Customer Satisfaction is a single measure that does the job. But it too is just one attribute of customer service: how satisfied customers are with it. There are potential dozens more, some being:
- How
likely a customer is to recommend the service
- How
likely a customer is to use the service again
- How
timely the service is
- How
accurately the service is carried out
- How
easy the service is to use
Is your customer survey just a random collection
of questions? Or have you put the thought into which specific attributes of
service are the most important to measure and improve?
We
can't measure concepts, only attributes.
So, it's attributes about concepts that we want to change or improve, and therefore measure. We won't ever find meaningful measures by asking 'how do we measure [concept]?'
To solve this problem, and to make it easier to find meaningful KPIs and performance measures, we can follow this line of questioning instead:
- What
about the concept is important right now?
- What
specific attributes do we want to change?
- What
would we observe as evidence of those changes?
- How
could we quantify that evidence to gauge the amount of change?
DISCUSSION: What are the hard-to-measure concepts that are
important to your organization right now? Do you know what attributes about
these concepts matter most to improve and measure?