The “Measurements, Numbers, Data” Epic

My obsession with measurements and data is far from secret, I write constantly about my conviction that we need to “put a number” on the people topics to elevate them in the agenda. To be fair, metrics of all kinds excite me, l’m one of those annoying people who is performance obsessed and enough of a control freak that l pour over numbers that show how l live my life - from working out, to sleeping and eating and even flow and productivity it’s all so satisfyingly quantifiable and it helps me tremendously to have the numbers to help inform the tweaks. At times l envy the seat-of-their-pants flying crew ,as some bout of nostalgia of adolescence breezes through, but l realise measuring how l’m doing is the only way to adult for me. How else am l going to know what to do more or less of to improve? Now granted, that’s not an intense goal for everyone and that’s the crux of the issue.

As a company who does nothing but helps quantify and improve, we’re obviously obsessed with data - shoutout to our team who positively smashed the momentous epic of our brand spanking new frontend (book us for a demo, we love showing it off)- and how we perform is a day-to-day preoccupation in the eternal quest to improve but equally, we know not everyone functions that way.

Just as people may not be driven by a need for betterment, neither are some organisations. I mean don’t get me wrong, you’d be hard-pressed to meet any who will openly admit it’s not a real preoccupation and everyone’s PR says the same things about the culture of learning but if you look at an organization’s data culture -or lack thereof-, you’ll soon see who is truly committed to continuous improvement and who’s the “Live.Laugh.Love” persuasion.

Agile by default lends itself to measurement, but if the organisation itself only ever adopted it as some trendy consultancy advised or to keep up with the corporate Jones, they are now doing it “by numbers” not by heart so they’ll have no curiosity around Agile KPIs.

I always had a suspicion this was the case but was further reminded of it when, while writing my “People Before Tech: The Importance of Teamwork and Psychological Safety in the Digital Age” book l put out a call to find some Agile superheroes to help me prove the PS-Agile correlation with a number so evident business could no longer ignore it.