Measuring Up

October 9, 2025

One number. That’s the tell.

My dad came up through the Canadian public service in the 80s and 90s, when Deming’s ideas of total quality management were in vogue, having proven their worth revolutionizing Japanese manufacturing. As is so often the case when people with authority are being asked to learn something that might challenge or change them, they were just as loudly repeated as they were meticulously ignored.

“People would come to my office”, he’d say “and tell me, ‘Hoye, if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.’ And I’d always say, if you can measure it then any jackass can manage it. You just twiddle the knobs until the number moves in the direction you want. You don’t need to understand how anything works. It’s when you can measure some things but not others, when you don’t know how good those numbers are and your goals are complicated and in tension, that’s where you find out who your real managers and leaders are.”

He knew that a lot – not all but definitely a lot – of the people hell-bent on measuring everything weren’t really trying to do better by the job, or their people, or to understand anything at all; they were trying to avoid accountability and commodify leadership.

But measurement really does matter, or at least it can! In good hands, good numbers can tell you a story about your organization that you’ve never heard before. Sometimes they’ll show you truths you’ve never seen about organization you’ve worked for years, that you might not even recognize.

We used to see this all the time at my last gig – here are the graphs, here are the trends, here’s how your organization really works and where it’s really going. And about half the time it was like turning the lights on after a party; longtime executives with wide eyes wondering how they’d never seen any of this before, suddenly seeing the organization they’d been running in the cold light of day for the first time. “We were all having a good time… what the hell happened here?”

But wouldn’t you want to know? If you’re in charge of some complicated humans-and-processes machine, wouldn’t you be at least a bit curious how it really works? Because there’s no shortage of people in this world extolling the virtues of curiosity and empathy in leadership, but I’ve never heard somebody ask, what if we just didn’t?

What if we were just utterly incurious about how anything worked, and displayed no interest in finding out. What would that look like in practice?

Intuitively, I think we all know what that total absence of empathy or curiosity looks like.

One number is the tell. “One number” is always the tell.

You’ve been there.

“Give me one number, one measure, a single proxy metric. I have no questions at all about how the machine works, what investments or tradeoffs we’re making, nothing at all as long as a line goes the right direction. Give me one number so I can sort and stack rank people and never need to ask how or why even once.”

Curiosity looks a lot like lots of questions, about things you can measure, things you can’t, how they work and why they matter; empathy looks a lot like listening to the answers. And it’s a lot of work, no question, but that’s where you find out who your real managers and leaders are.

The people who aren’t that – the people who just want the job to be easy, who want something to point to so they can say, I didn’t make this decision, it was just the numbers, the people who absolutely cannot be trusted with numbers – are going to ask you for one number.

So, maybe remember that when you’re asking people to reduce themselves and their work to just one number, you’re telling on yourself. You’re telling people what you are, and they’re going to believe you.