‘If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.’ Peter Drucker.
‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’ Albert Einstein.
How can both be true?
The first is half true, the second is absolutely true, which leaves us with a problem, if it is not measured, how can we manage it?
A lot of things cannot be measured, good parenting, the enjoyment you get from watching a great game of football, business culture, the likelihood of a new product succeeding in a non-existent market.
Take that game of football, the statistics tell one story, the game as watched may tell another entirely. The stats do not reflect the quality of the game.
What about the future, how do you measure that?
Tough call.
You cannot measure what has not happened, but you can draw inferences from all sorts of variables, quantitative and qualitative.
Digital has driven a bias towards quantitative, all we hear about is A/B testing to the point where we feel diminished if we do not do it. However, this mad reliance on the quantitative is a nasty illusion, a mirage, leading many astray. Qualitative has a huge place in telling the future, it is a way to fill in the behavioural blanks, to imagine what may happen in a given situation.
Qualitative research can be an aid to the intuition born of experience, and domain knowledge, factors not able to be quantified. It is also a great way to surface the questions that need to be asked in a following quantitative process, which is useless without the questions that go to the heart of the drivers of the behaviours being quantified.
Qualitative research when done well, and unfortunately I have seen it done poorly more often than well, digs into the psychological and motivational aspects of behaviour. Not just what we do, but why we do it, and what might we do in the future.
The missing ingredient in most ‘future-telling’ exercises, usually called ‘forecasting,’ is the wisdom born of experience. Frederico Fellini once quipped that ‘experience is what you get while looking for something else’.
It seems to me that wisdom, and the insights that emerge from that wisdom, come from a lot of experience.
