What we choose to count

How people measure success

A few years ago I asked a man who'd spent thirty years running a small, but successful, engineering firm how he'd know whether it had been a good year for the business. He noodled a coaster on his desk and looked out towards the engineering machines. He didn't immediately reach for a number. After what felt like a minute of two he said that if the same people were still here next Christmas, and he still fancied coming in on a Monday, it had been a good year. Then he made me a terrible cup of coffee and showed me a machine he was proud of.

Part of what I do — the study underneath everything — is talk to people about how they turn their ideas turn into value. It means sitting across from all sorts of people: founders and makers and farmers and chefs, people who run restaurants and people who run funds and people who run charities, the woman with four hundred staff and the man who is the entire company himself.

I noticed early on that no two of them define success in the same way. One wants out of the nine-to-five and never back in. One wants to make an indecent amount of money and mentioned it whenever he could. One wants to build something her children might want to take on, something to outlive her. One wants to sell the whole thing in five years and lie on a beach sipping posh cocktails. One just wants the phone to stop ringing at weekends and the machines to not break down.

You'd think, with all that, they'd have nothing in common at all. But the ones whose work seemed to be genuinely taking their ideas and turning them into value, whoever they were — turned out to share something indeed, and it wasn't a target. It was the way they used measurement at all.

They treated a number as a signal, not a scoreboard. A way of checking whether the thing they actually cared about was happening. The engineer I was speaking with cared about people staying, and about mornings still feeling worth it, so those were the things he watched, in his own rough way – which happens to be nothing more than in his own head. He'd have failed to understand every dashboard I've ever seen in the corporate world, and yet he knew exactly how his business was doing.

Which is a remarkably interesting thing that I find refreshing, until you spend any time in the other world — the one of OKRs and KPIs and scorecards, of quarterly reviews where grown adults argue about the framework instead of the work itself. Where the discussion is about the methodology or approach, rather than the idea that wants to become something of value. I've sat in plenty of those kinds of meetings and events. The acronyms seemingly multiply and the clarity becomes harder to find. Everyone is measuring furiously, and spending a fortune on information radiators, and nobody can quite say whether the idea actually turned into something, and whether it was good to be part of that too.

Some of that is because we measure what's easy and available rather than what matters, and money is the easiest of these. So we count it, and then mistake it for the point of everything everyone is doing.

But money was never the point of the work. It's what happens when the work is good and valuable — the side-effect of making something a customer is happy to pay for. A necessary side-effect in some respects; the life the whole organisation breathes, and you're finished the moment you run out. But you don't keep a person alive by having them concentrate on their breathing, and you don't make a business good by staring at the money. You make something worth paying for, and the money turns up to tell you that you did. And with that money you get to do it again, and again, and to keep the whole thing alive.

The trouble is that measuring isn't the neutral act we pretend it is. What you choose to count is a statement of what you value — and people are clever, so they give you exactly what you're watching for.

Measure only speed and you'll get speed, along with a trail of things done fast and maybe not worth anything. Measure only cost and you'll get cheapness, in every sense of the word. Measure only output and you may get people beautifully busy at nothing in particular - and giving you watermelon reporting as a side effect.

The most revealing thing about any organisation isn't what it measures. It's what it has decided not to. And the thing left uncounted, more often than not, is the people. They are the ones who are turning an idea into something real – something that can be passed on to someone who may want to pay for it. Their morale, their taste and judgement, their joy, their sense of belonging and their learning often left untracked over time, or mistaken for something showing on the spurious and lagging engagement surveys.

The engineer had it spot on in another way, too. He wasn't watching a single figure on a single day; he was watching a direction over years — who stayed, how Mondays felt, whether the work still held his interest, and of course, whether he was creating something worth paying for. A snapshot tells you almost nothing. A number on a Tuesday is just a number on a Tuesday. It's the movement over time, the shape of the thing as it ebbs and flows through the life of a business, that tells you what kind of system you're really running.

Through my research I've come to see the whole business of measurement, stripped of its acronyms, is mostly about restraint. The confidence to watch a few true things instead of a hundred convenient ones. To simplify down to what really matters instead of what can simply be measured. To keep four main categories – money, products, delivery, people – separate from each other but visible side by side. And to focus on using the numbers to guide decisions, rather than merely reporting them because someone thought it was a good idea.

Clarity rarely arrives on another dashboard. It comes from fewer, better questions. Are we making something worth making? Are we working on the right things? Is this a good place to spend a life?

The engineer, and the charity owner, and the founder all know this, we all do, it's obvious in our own lives too. The engineer had measured the right things for thirty years without once calling them metrics or building an AI dashboard, and he still liked his Mondays. I've interviewed people running companies a thousand times the size of his, with giant dashboard, who couldn't tell me which numbers really mattered, and what they showed over time.

And from my research a remarkable thing appears, at every scale. Those who simplify, who don't measure everything, are often the ones who are crystal clear about how their business is tracking, in a way that matters to them.