The (Real) One Score You Need to Grow

This week I busied myself with attacking a big topic on the other newsletter: the BS of the NPS measurement and unsurprisingly that didn’t go down well. In particular when it comes to anyone using it for any type of internal measurement be it satisfaction or experience or even performance. I am going to leave aside the criticism of NPS as a customer polling mechanism for the sake of this discussion, solely because let’s face it, we have enough difficulty reminding people that the first principle says:

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software” so from that perspective, asking anything at all that will give us a measure of how we fared on that topic is better than nothing, even if said measurement is nothing to write home about.

The articles in question are: “NPS Is BS and We All Know It” and the other one that basically just begs people to perform regular audits of all their measurements and question everything because nothing built 20 years ago holds in our VUCA world entitled “Be a Detractor of (Internal) NPS to Be a Promoter of Your Organisation”. Let's just say they weren't universally well-received and I have undoubtedly created myself some detractors in the process of pointing at the naked bum of the NPS emperor but that's ok, used to it by now.

What’s most contentious to my mind, is how we have allowed NPS to permeate and lend itself to becoming prevalent as an internal measurement through mechanisms that don’t make immediate sense to me (perhaps due to the perennial nature of Forbes articles and the fact that the initial “The One Number You Need to Grow” piece is still up; or perhaps it is about Bain’s business smarts and how they clearly had enough “promoters” in the C-suite to be pushing this unexamined process, who knows, hardly seems like the forensics is worthwhile). That’s what we need to debate.

Let me be clear, the debate in itself I fiercely appreciate, the discourse where people are passionate enough that they come out to defend it in ways that make sense to them. That’s super valuable, understanding what sliver of usefulness anyone perceives in a score so perverse it dictates for the least comprehensible scoring system known to man. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.