The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 168 - Measurement

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: So I've spent the last ten or so days thinking about an idea that I feel like you'll have some good thoughts on, I know you'll help me unpack, and it relates to measurement. And more specifically, the ways that we, as humans, as business leaders, as coaches, as creatives, the way that our listeners, the way that everybody measures success, measures their impact, measures anything, really. And I'm just like getting really curious about what it looks like to get intentional about the way we measure things.

Jen: I am actually quite obsessed with this topic, so very, very eager to dive in. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Did I know this about you, that you're obsessed about measurement? I'm not sure.

Jen: Well, I really like to track things. But I have a very strict ethos about how tracking happens, and when it happens, and what I'm actually measuring, and all that kind of good stuff. I'm sure we'll get there. I'm sure we'll get there.

Pete: I'm sure. I'm sure we will. I have two just like ideas or quotes that I'd like to just ground this conversation in, which I think might be good jumping off points. The first is this idea that I've heard over and over and over again from many, many, many different people out there that talk about productivity, and measurement, and business, and success. And the line is, "What gets measured gets managed." So, there's that quote. And then there's this idea that...I heard it from Warren Buffett, but I think he's quoting Benjamin Graham, who was one of the great value investors in the past. And he talks about the concept that in the short run, in the short term, the market is like a voting machine which tallies up popular firms, unpopular firms. (I'm really like keeping this as simple as possible and definitely butchering this quote, I'm sure.) However, in the long run, the market is more like a weighing machine assessing the substance of a company. So I've been thinking about that idea, votes versus weights. I've been thinking about the idea of what gets measured and how that might determine what gets managed. And I just want you to help me unpack this more.

Jen: Okay. Well, I think having a system, or a process, or a concept for measuring is so important. And I think it's very easy to start measuring the wrong things, or measuring things that become a distraction and can easily get you on a path that you might not want to be on. So the way I like to engage with the concept of measuring is, if I am setting a goal, for example, I do so much work first to determine what the goal specifically is, what the timeline is, what are the actions I can take. Then I weed out some of the actions that might not have a significant impact, and I make sure that what I'm doing is realistic. And then after I've done all of that, I will ask myself, "What actually needs to be measured in order to assess my progress toward this goal? And what are the methods that I'm going to use?" Because every goal is different. It would be very silly for me to assume that I could use one measurement system for every single thing I'm in pursuit of. So I'm very, very aggressively specific about measuring because I do not want to leave it up to happenstance and then all of a sudden, I hear that someone else is tracking X, Y, and Z, so I start tracking X, Y, and Z when it has absolutely nothing to do with the thing that I am in pursuit of. So, there's that.

Pete: Yeah. I feel a little called out. And I like that you aggressively-

Jen: [singing] Jen calls Peter out.

Pete: Didn't take long today, three minutes. Okay, I have a few thoughts, responses. I should have mentioned too, that this thought process that I've been having really stemmed from a conversation that actually a dear friend of mine, Mary Freer, had with Seth Godin in an interview that she did for the Compassion Revolution, which is this big world-wide global conference in helping folks in healthcare really bring more compassion to the way that they work. So, within that context, they were talking about votes. They were talking about, "What do you measure in a hospital? What do you measure as an entrepreneur? What do you measure as a freelancer?" Like really unpacking it, as you imagine Seth might do and, of course, my brilliant friend Mary, who really helped me start to see and start to realize that if you don't think about this, like to use your words, if you don't get aggressively specific...which I think like I can see myself, in so many different examples, where I haven't, which is why I said I've been called out...you like default to what someone else is measuring.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: Or you default to the obvious metrics that people are sending you, like I'll use an example with the podcast, for example. If we don't sit around and say, "This is exactly how we are measuring the podcast," the default for me is like, "I'll just check how many downloads we've had."

Jen: Right.

Pete: Because I guess that's a metric, you know? But we've not actually sat down and said, "What are the things we're measuring?" Like if we're measuring five star reviews on Apple, well, we've got a few hundred of them, I believe. And so, like we're actually doing pretty well. But if you looked at downloads on any given day, like a public holiday when no one's listening to podcasts, you might get down in the dumps and go, "Oh my god, it's not going well. No one's listening to the podcast." So I just am realizing, calling myself out, and like thinking about how if we're not aggressively specific, we really set ourselves up to kind of spiral and compare.

Jen: Yes. And because we live in a culture that really does value measuring things, it's easy to make the measuring the priority and to try to get your measurement systems in place first, and then figure out what you're going to do second. I've just seen too many people (myself included) fall down that rabbit hole, which is why I really do a lot of pre-work first, before I even consider, "How might I measure this?"

Pete: Yeah. The other thing I like, specifically if I go back to that Benjamin Graham quote and the idea of weights versus votes, is there's actually a lot of different ways to measure something, or the impact you're having, beyond the easy to think about raw metrics like downloads, for example. And remind me, who was it that said they measure their success by the amount of times that the hair stands up on the back of their neck?

Jen: Dr. Michael Gervais? Dr. Michael Gervais.

Pete: Right. Such a great example of like a unique way to measure success. "If the hairs on the back of my neck stood up five times today, that's a great day."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Like, as opposed to how many people listened to my TED talk, or watched my keynote, or whatever the random raw metric is. So I just think that there are so many other unique ways to think about measurement, which I hadn't necessarily considered until I had thought about this idea of weights versus votes.

Jen: It's also really easy to get caught in a negative self-talk, self-shame spiral when you haven't been intentional and specific with what you're measuring. To your point earlier, you know, you borrow someone else's metrics and you're like, "Oh gosh, I must be really awful. I must be really, really terrible."

Pete: I know what you're talking about.

Jen: "Because that person has invested so much and made this metric of priority, and I've just fallen behind on that, so I must be a total fraud. You know what I should do? Quit. Yep."

Pete: Yeah. Thank you for taking that transcript straight out of my brain, Jen.

Jen: Yeah, I've memorized it because, you know, I've played that game with myself.

Pete: I think we all have. I think we all have. So the other, I guess, example of how I've thought about this is, you know, so like let's just use the podcast audience as an example, because it's easy and it's kind of meta. If one was measuring the success of their podcast through the number of downloads, one might look at a podcast that has, I don't know, say you get one thousand downloads an episode, and you might think, "Huh. Only a thousand people are listening to my podcast. I hear other people have millions of downloads per episode. All of the, you know, big podcasts get millions and hundreds of thousands, so I'm a failure." Or you might look at it and think about weight versus counting or voting, and maybe the weight of those thousand, maybe if you're doing a podcast on artificial intelligence and you have the thousand smartest, brightest, most brilliant minds on artificial intelligence like, I don't know, the head of Google, and the head of someone at Tesla, the head of something at Amazon, like all of the big, big minds thinking about artificial intelligence...well, actually, if you had those thousand, you don't need the million. Your "success" is determined by the fact that your weight is quite heavy, quite a lot. Does that make sense? Am I making sense?

Jen: Yes. And it's pointing me back to a really fundamental concept that we talk about on so many episodes of this podcast, which is, "What are your values? What is your purpose? What is your desired impact?" If you don't have clarity around what those things are, then of course you're going to measure the most generic thing available to you. Like you know, for someone, number of downloads might be very specific. But for us, that's not necessarily what we're measuring. Because what is the impact we are trying to have with our podcast? What is the intention behind the podcast? Well, the intention is to get people to ask themselves better questions, to engage with their community and with us in ways that feel new and exciting. So I'm more interested in people sharing the podcast, sending us emails, asking us questions, and such. Those are the times where I feel successful as a podcaster. In the history of our podcast, we've had a couple like major spikes on certain episodes because someone fancy has shared the podcast. Now, if that spike in listeners didn't come back for another episode, does that mean we're a failure? Or if some of those listeners listened and thought, "Ah. That is an interesting way for me to think about the world, and I'm getting better questions out of this," but if we only retained a small percentage of that spike but it was the audience we were making the podcast for, isn't that a success?

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: So, it's important to know what you're about. Otherwise, you can't really measure your progress.

Pete: Yeah. You know, I've talked about this with some clients of mine in coaching. Is, actually, that they leave when they've got what they need. You know?

Jen: Mmm. Yeah.

Pete: So maybe in that example, someone listens, they get the question that they need that helps them unlock the thing they're stuck on in their role as a leader, as a manager, as a creative, as a freelancer or whatever, and they go, "Oh my god, that is exactly what I needed in this moment," and off they go. And maybe they don't tune in again, but the impact that they've created is such that it doesn't matter that they didn't come back and tune in. So it's like, you know, the potential ripple effect that we might not see, as well, is curious to me. I say this to clients of mine quite a lot, like, "If after three months, six months, one month of coaching, you've got exactly what you need in this moment, I'm not going to hold...like, you're not handcuffed to working with me. Like, it's okay that you go, 'Pete, I've got what I need right now. I'm going to go and action all of this.'" Instead of, what can happen is you start to like almost hide in the coaching or hide in the theorizing of the thing that you're stuck on, as opposed to putting it into action.

Jen: Yes. Okay, I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction, but I think it connects. So I'm imagining your reaction to what I'm about to say, just because I know how the thought of singing in public makes you want to vomit on your shoes.

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: So in my classes, everyone records their work, video records their work. And it's not for sharing. In fact, they're not supposed to share it. But they're supposed to go home and watch it. So it's, you know, fifteen to twenty minutes of them doing messy, exploratory, experimental work, you know, that needs work. And one of the things we always talk about when I tell them that and they all, you know, cringe, I say, "You have to go in and watch this knowing what you're looking for. So it's not like, 'Let me watch and see what I discover, and then I can decide if that's worthy.' And it's certainly not, 'Let me watch this to see if I like myself.' It's, 'Okay, I'm going in to look at how much jaw tension I have while I'm singing.' Or, 'I want to pay attention to the quality of movement. Am I really giving myself as full a range of motion as I have? Can I give myself more freedom in that one particular area?'" And it's very helpful, and people are able to then go home and take a more objective approach to measuring their work.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And you know, it's easy when it's something tangible like money, or downloads, or votes. But when it's something more abstract, I think it's very important to be able to put into words for yourself, "What are you actually looking for?"

Pete: Yeah, gosh, I'm obsessed with that. I'm obsessed with that. I think that plays into everything that we've talked about. I'm reminded of a couple of things. One is, I remember talking to Seth Godin about this, I'm pretty sure he's written it on his blog (I'll try and find it and put it in the Box O' Goodies) about like delivering a keynote. Because I think the underlying question that I'm thinking about as we talk about all this is, can we get clear in, "What does success look like for this?" So answering that question, I think, first of all, "What does success look like?" And then jumping off that, it's probably, "And how might I manage that?" Or, "How will I measure that?" "How will I measure that," is probably a better question. So I remember Seth saying to me, in really simple terms, that, "Success for a keynote is that you change the energy in the room." Period. That's it. Now in terms of how you might do that, storytelling is a pretty good start, which is kind of a Seth Godin approach. And so I've thought about that a lot, that if I stand at the front and talk in a monotone voice and deliver a sixty-five slide presentation, I'm probably not going to change the energy in the room in a positive way. So maybe there's actually an add-on to that, which is, "Change the energy in the room positively." I might suck the energy out of the room. What we're actually trying to do is spark an idea, spark action, spark an energy transfer. And so, I think that as an example of like, "That's how you're trying to measure success in a keynote." You're not trying to, you know, measure the amount of questions that you get after. You're not trying to measure whether you get a standing ovation or whatever. It's just, "Can I transfer some energy? Can I change this energy in the room positively?" And so I go back to, I think that a way to think about this (Pete, I'm talking to you) is get really clear in, "What does success look like for...fill-in-the-blank?"

Jen: Yes.

Pete: And then, "How might I measure it?"

Jen: I don't know how many of our listeners are engaged in the keynoting world, but it's such a good example. Because across the keynote industry, everybody is essentially doing the exact same thing. They are getting on a stage for forty-five minutes and then they're answering questions for fifteen minutes, or some version of that. But, you're right. So Seth, or you would measure your success by, "I go onstage for forty-five minutes, I answer the questions for fifteen minutes. Did I change the energy in the room?" I know other keynoters who measure their success by how many books they sell after the talk, how many subsequent talks they book with the same client. I, for a while, was measuring my success in a keynote by how many people stayed after to tell me their life story.

Pete: Oh, that's cool. I love that.

Jen: So the inputs are the same, but the desired outputs are different.

Pete: Mmm. And I think like it's worth saying that none is right. There's no true right answer here, it's just that there are differences. And so what we need to get clear on is, what is our version of that? What is your version of success? It doesn't have to be the version that I borrowed from Seth, or Seth's version, or the bookselling version. It can be whatever version of success or whatever definition you decide to give to it, and it can change over time.

Jen: Yeah. So the hard part isn't the measuring, the hard part is the naming of, "What is important? What is meaningful? What is your desired impact? What is your purpose, your intention, your vision for the thing that you're doing?" And that takes some serious self-awareness, self-reflection, and some patience with yourself. And it is easy to want to fast track that, and skip it all, and just figure out, "Okay. I'm giving a keynote, and people come to the keynote. So if they stand, that's it. That's success." It takes a lot more hard work to get to the root of why the keynote matters in the first place.

Pete: Yeah. And then to take that a step further, and manage future versions of that (i.e. learn from what you measured.) And so, thinking about, "What went well? What didn't go well? How might I manage (i.e. change) what I did in order to get closer to that thing that I'm seeking to measure?"

Jen: Mm-hmm. Indeed. Well, listeners, it feels like this would be an appropriate time for us to share with you that we would measure success by how many times you share this podcast with a friend, how many times you reach out to us, and honestly, how many times people are willing to challenge some of the ideas we put forward. Like, it feels very successful to us when someone's like, "I heard that, and I think you might have missed the mark a bit. And have you thought about it this way?" That is how we measure success. So if you like this podcast, please share it, write to us, ask us questions, challenge us.

Pete: Please come on over. Our website is thelongandtheshortpodcast.com, for those that don't know, and we would love to hear from you.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.