The young girl, near 15, sat across from her grandfather in the neighboring coffee shop table. She sat with fixed attention on her cell phone, she paused to take inventory, then said to her grandfather: “I have twelve email messages; seven from Facebook, two from Twitter, and three directly from friends. I’m popular!”
When I heard it, I felt stunned gratitude. Though commonly understood, I’d never witnessed it more nakedly. Thank you for unclad disclosure of your measure; for disclosing, or intimating, what you believe your measurement measures: your popularity, connectedness, relevance, your social security. Thank you for disclosing how you feel when your measurements meet your needs. Your disclosure is a gift, a metaphor for our hazardous struggle. Thank you for revealing the pressures that your measurements place on your heart, your mind, your body.
Her grandfather was conspicuously silent, to this, and to several subsequent pronouncements, as if working out a puzzle; perhaps this puzzle.
We, our minds, bodies and infrastructure, are forged under the pressures of our attention, attention to what we value and desire, attention to the path to which we aspire. We attend to what we measure, and what we measure molds us through the force of our attention. And this is how we become what we measure.
Some qualities are easier to measure, to quantify, to characterize and communicate: how fast, much or far; how high, wide or deep; how many, how heavy, how hot; how long, fast or steep. Some qualities are difficult to measure, others we can only measure with our bodies. Their richness or uniqueness, their complex, mercurial or sublime nature defies simple quantification. Some qualities, compositions and orchestras of qualities, are known only when we feel them: emotions, resilience, vitality, health, diversity, security, freedom, autonomy.
We measure to focus our attention, to locate our path, our path to the role we wish to play, our storied path toward the people we intend to become, the culture, the organization, the world toward which we aspire. We measure to meet our needs. Our measures can be cairns to guide us on our path, lighthouses to warn us of danger, landmarks to orient our position. And, when we measure without aspiration, measure without looking where our measures will take us, we’re molded by what we measure anyway.
The sage Calvin, of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, once demonstrated our challenge in simple form: Calvin swings a bat. He hits a baseball high into the air. Calvin drops the bat, grabs his glove, runs, runs, runs, and catches the ball before it hits the ground. Then, with a perplexed expression of awakening, Calvin says: “I’m out?” Calvin was confused. He’d lost track of which game he intended to play. He was confused about what and how to measure, about how to evaluate his accomplishment.
A client asked for my help to find measures of their outcomes, their performance, to identify measures that would guide them, measures that would communicate their success. An outside agency was planning to implement performance based disbursements of grant funding, funding that was previously granted based upon population, upon need. The granting agency wanted to incentivize innovation, to increase the effectiveness of their grant recipients, grant recipients that traditionally cooperated and shared what they learned. When we measure for relative validation, or for zero sum disbursement, we create competition, we suppress cooperation. My client was in danger of being morphed from a cooperative partner into proprietary competitor. They were in danger of being transformed into antithetical forms, transformed by measures threatening their existence. This Faustian dilemma is easily created by misguided measurements; to become what we celebrate, what we honor, or to become what we dread in order to survive.
When we step onto the bathroom scale, are we measuring our health, or are we measuring our self worth, our value to society, our relevance? When we proudly drive faster than the flow, are we measuring our social progress, our superiority, do we believe, against intuition and reason, that others are impressed? When our legal systems measure progress by efficiency, by the number of cases adjudicated per day, week, year, are we measuring justice? The map is not the territory, the model is not the system, and our measures are not the ends we intend to achieve. The map, the model, the measure, are all tools to focus our attention, and when we’re blinded by our measure, we’re led astray by serial idolatry of our measurements, and forged into unfortunate shapes.
We measure to find our way; it’s what consciousness does. When we return to our attention to our desired narratives, when we check our measurement’s breadcrumb trail, check if it guides us along our desired path, we wake up from our measurement dream. A measure’s value is protected when it’s one of many organisms in our measurement ecosystem. Measurement diversity liberates us from the blindness of measurement idolatry.
They relaxed into their table. The young girl, satisfied with her social security, became quiet, pensive. She asked her grandfather: “why did my brother kill himself”. After a pause, her grandfather said: “Sometimes people find life very difficult, they become confused and measure the wrong things, such as popularity, to see their own value.” Then he complimented his granddaughter on her courage to ask about her brother, her courage to seek understanding. The granddaughter responded: “I know what you mean, I get upset sometimes too and want friends to text so I feel important.” The elder man complimented his granddaughter on her insight and empathy into her brother’s struggle. What grace.
It turned out that the grandfather was working out a puzzle; working out how to help his granddaughter identify wise measures; courage, understanding, insight, empathy. He was helping her to find measures to mold her heart, mind, and body into resilient and compassionate shapes.