Jerry Z. Muller – The Tyranny Of Metrics (2018)
Fantastisch boek! Het beschrijft hoe management van ondersteunend ‘ineens’ leidend kan worden. Met name de instanties die niet primair gericht zijn op winstmaximalisatie (e.g., overheid, zorg) zijn kwetsbaar voor de ongeremde groei in middenmanagement. De auteur betoogt het belang van vakinhoudelijk kennis indien er toch metrics gebruikt zouden worden om keuzes te onderbouwen, deze eis zou 95% van het management overbodig maken. Good riddance.
When metrics are used by managers as a tool to control professionals, it often creates a tension between the managers who seek to measure and reward performance, and the ethos of the professionals (doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, professors, etc.). The professional ethos is based on mastery of a body of specialized knowledge acquired through an extended process of education and training; autonomy and control over work; an identification with one’s professional group and a sense of responsibility towards colleagues; a high valuation of intrinsic rewards; and a commitment to the interests of clients above considerations of cost.
The key components of metric fixation are:
- The belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardized data (metrics);
- The belief that making such metrics public (transparent) assures that institutions are actually carrying out their purposes (accountability);
- The belief that the best way to motivate people within these organizations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measures performance, rewards that are either monetary (pay-for-performance) or reputational (rankings).
Quantification is seductive, because it organizes and simplifies knowledge. It offers numerical information that allows for easy comparison among people and institutions. But that simplification may lead to distortions, since making thing comparable often means that they are stripped of their context, history, and meaning. The result is that the information appears more certain and authoritative than is actually the case: the caveats, the ambiguities, and uncertainties are peeled away, and nothing does more to create the appearance of certain knowledge that expressing it in numerical form.
One vector of the metric fixation was the rise of management consultants, outfitted with the managerial skills of quantitative analysis, whose first maxim was “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation not only gave the impression of scientific expertise based on ‘hard’ evidence, it also minimizes the need for specific, intimate knowledge of the institutions to whom advice was being sold.
The error of rationalism, is its failure to appreciate the necessity of practical knowledge and of knowledge of the peculiarity of circumstances.
Metric fixation precludes entrepreneurship within organizations, as there may be new goals and purposes worth pursuing that are not part of the metric. The calculative is the enemy of the imaginative.
Businesses have a built-in restraint on devoting too much time and money to measurement – at some point it cuts into profits. Ironically, since universities and other nonprofit institutions have no such bottom line, government or accrediting agencies or the university’s administrative leadership can extend metrics endlessly.
The demand for performance measures sometimes flows from the ignorance of executives about the institutions they’ve been hired to manage, and that ignorance is often a result of parachuting into an organization with which one had little experience
Ultimately, the issue is not one of metrics versus judgment, but metrics as informing judgment, which includes knowing how much weight to give to metrics, recognizing their characteristic distortions and appreciating what can’t be measured