It has 288 words, although the word “column” only appears once. Those 288 words are spread across 32 lines. The letter “a” appears 65 times, but the letter “f” only appears 13 times.
So tell me…
How much do you like this song?
“Wait, wait…!” I hear you cry. “But I don’t know anything about this song. All you’ve done is give me some numbers and statistics.”
And yet in a business setting, once we have 5 or 6 datapoints, people are generally quite comfortable making decisions.
That’s especially true for people who inhabit head offices several hundred miles away from the front line of business operations. Things are so much simpler there – that’s where they “manage by the numbers” all the time, perhaps comparing statistics between different subsidiary companies and using those statistics to decide which subsidiaries to keep and which should be sold.
But what if I produced something 320 words long, used the word “column” twice, and spread those 320 words across 38 lines. And imagine I maintained the letter “a” count, but boosted the letter “f” to 19 appearances.
Well, what I’ve written must be better, right?
Across pretty much all those metrics I’ve achieved substantially more than the first song did, haven’t I?
So it stands to reason you must like my song better.
That’s what the numbers say. And numbers never lie…(or so people often tell me…)
The prejudice of perception
OK. I’ll make it a little easier for you to decide if you like this song.
But the minute I give you the next piece of information, you’re likely to jump to a conclusion.
Your preconceived ideas about different musical styles will overlay everything else you might have thought up to this point. It will no longer matter if there are 288 letters in the song or how many times the letter “a” appears.
You might not instantly decide if you like the song when I tell you this. But a lot of people will take an instant dislike to it just based on the next piece of information I give you.
Are you ready?
It’s a country song.
What do you think about the song now?
After all, you have lots of data points about the song and you now know the context for those numbers. That’s more than enough for a decision one way or the other, isn’t it?
Well, if you’re a Brit, odds are you’ll already have decided you don’t like the song because country music is not very popular in the UK. If you’re from the US or Canada, it’s slightly more likely that you’ll be prepared to give it a chance still, but “likers” are probably still in a minority overall.
And that’s the prejudice of perception – something that, whether you like it or not, comes along for the ride any time you see some metrics.
Whether it’s right or not, or fair or not, your mind takes shortcuts to assess whether something is good or bad, even if you can’t articulate a logical process by which your brain reached that conclusion.
“It’s country music” is enough for most people to decide they wouldn’t like the song, even though the average Brit doesn’t listen to enough country music to be able to make a rational decision one way or the other.
Mind-bending time
In the interests of full disclosure, I sold you a bit of a dummy there. But I did it on purpose to make a point about perception.
It would have been more accurate of me to say that the song I’m writing about here started out as a country song. However, it became a massive crossover hit in the pop charts.
And what if I told you that, by the early 2000s, this song became the second most-played song on US radio stations, beaten only by the Beatles’ recording of “Yesterday”.
Now do you think you might like it?
After all, radio stations have no incentive to play records their listeners don’t like. If listeners get bored and tune away before the next commercial break, that costs the radio station money in reduced ad revenues.
So millions of people must enjoy listening to this “country song”. Presumably even people who, like you, probably, “don’t like country music”.
How does that work?
Well, in decision-making terms, we’ve introduced some social proof into the equation. Social proof is very powerful in swaying people’s decisions in the direction the person sharing that information wants to sway them.
And, probably, with that knowledge under your belt, you’re now feeling much more positive about that 288-word song. After all, millions of people can’t be wrong…right?
Let’s layer in something else
Now it’s likely you’re feeling much more positive about the song, let’s layer in something else.
The person who had the big crossover hit with this song didn’t write it. The original singer/songwriter had a very modest level of success with his version, but the person who took the original version made the tiniest of tweaks before re-releasing it. That’s all it took to turn the song into a million-seller.
However the person who had the big hit was pretty much unknown by the general public when they released their cover version.
They were an experienced, and highly-regarded, musician in their own right. But they worked as an uncredited studio musician who beavered away in the shadows to produce records which made other people famous. Generally, they didn’t even get a mention on the liner notes.
So, this song didn’t become a million-seller because a famous name muscled their way into the process, short-circuiting the hard work needed to sell millions of records.
I wonder how you feel about the song now.
Odds are, a lot more positive.
You’ll recognise, given this background, that the song and the performance must have been exceptional to get any traction at all against a sea of indifference from the record-buying public. For a little-known song to be turned into a global hit record from those inauspicious beginnings, it must have been something special.
So let’s knock your confidence again
Now that you’re feeling much more positive about this mystery record, let me introduce just one other piece of information.
This is also likely to polarise opinions…so, fair warning. All the positive feelings you’ve been building up might be about to take a knock.
Here it is…
This 288-word masterpiece features a banjo throughout.
Now, I quite like a banjo, but it’s an instrument most people have strong opinions about. Mostly negative ones.
It’s something of an acquired taste, I grant you. But if you check your thinking process so far, you’ll probably find that, starting from a low base, your increasing sense that the song I’m describing is likely to be good has probably taken a big knock in the last couple of paragraphs.
However none of the original data has changed.
The song still has 288 words. It still has only one instance of the word “column” and 13 instances of the letter “f”.
Everything has remained exactly as it was in the very first line of this article. All I’ve done is play with your perceptions about whether this mystery song is likely to be any good or not.
And I’ve done this to illustrate the problem of just “managing by the numbers”.
Of course numbers are important
I’m not suggesting for a moment that numbers aren’t important. I’ve built a career based on compiling and managing numbers.
But I find, in corporate settings, people make two common mistakes in the way they look at the numbers on their reporting dashboards or KPI reports.
Firstly, numbers are used far too superficially in many review processes. There’s no possible way of knowing whether a 288-word song is any good or not without some additional information.
The one thing we know for sure, though, is that more words doesn’t necessarily make a better song. Yet in a lot of organisations, the only objective that matters is to make whatever the numbers were last year into bigger numbers this year.
That’s unlikely to be your route to successful world domination.
Secondly, the measures we use tend to be too inward-looking. The numbers I gave at the start of this article are equivalent to the data spat out by the average corporate information management system – true, as far as they go, but shorn of so much context that they aren’t really much help in managing the business.
When I told you that the song was a million-seller, and the second most-played song of all-time on US radio, your perception of whether or not it was likely to be a good song shifted dramatically.
And while I apologise for bringing the mood down a little by mentioning the banjo at the end, that was just to illustrate that more internally-generated information alone is probably not helping you make a decision about how good a song is.
Yet, when organisations manage metrics and dashboards, they tend to look for more and more internally-generated information – with a huge investment in time and money, it has to be said – when comparatively small amounts of information from outside your business might give you all you need to know about how well something is doing.
We don’t spend nearly enough time tracking down external perspectives, and far too much time chasing down the tiniest, and largely irrelevant, details of internally-generated information.
Oh, and before you say it, doing things like tracking NPS scores or sending out customer surveys – while better than doing nothing at all – are not really the answer.
NPS has its uses, but the way the process is used inside many businesses is to turn some small external data points into internal data which, shorn of context and meaning, is probably not much help in the decision-making process, over and above what you already know.
The challenge is to go out much wider for information without forcing it to fit into a KPI dashboard-friendly format.
The search for meaning
Any set of metrics, when done well, are about conveying meaning. They’re not just about conveying numbers.
When you understand the meaning behind the numbers, you need comparatively few metrics to run your business.
And that’s not easy.
For example, the song I’m talking about is, to me, a desperately sad song about a love that should have been, but never was.
But I know someone who thinks the song is an inspirational tale of a love that a person carried in their heart their whole life through, no matter the slings and arrows that were thrown in their direction along the way.
To be fair, both meanings are entirely consistent with the lyrics. But whether you take one view or the other will determine which emotions come to you when you hear this song.
And the same is true of your metrics and KPIs. On their own, they’re fairly meaningless unless you know what you want to do with them, and the objective you’re trying to reach.
Most FTSE100 chief executives wouldn’t think that being rude to their customers on social media was a positive for their business.
Yet Ryanair have turned that into an art form and their business has grown despite…or perhaps because of…having a very different attitude to their customer satisfaction statistics than most other public companies.
What a metric means is much more important than what the number is.
Quals often beats quants
Unless you’re running an infinitely repeatable process, like mixing together a handful of chemicals to make a shampoo, or building a new car on an assembly line, quantitative information can only take you so far.
Quantitative information like the 288 words, or the number of times the letter “a” appears in a song have very little bearing on a “soft metric” like “did you enjoy the song or not?”
Mostly, what we want to know is whether or not customers enjoyed dealing with us.
A few metrics along the way might provide helpful information for controlling our own internal processes.
But ultimately no amount of KPIs can definitively answer the question “did you enjoy dealing with our business?”…even though that’s the only question that really matters.
Far too often I’ve seen businesses in real trouble convince themselves there was nothing to worry about because all their quantitively-based KPIs were pretty much where they wanted them to be.
One time, I did some work for an organisation where customers described the atmosphere as “unwelcoming and occasionally hostile”.
No amount of green-rated quantitative KPI scorecards can counteract that qualitative perception of an organisation.
Yet, the people who complained were seen as “troublemakers” or “people who we wouldn’t have wanted to deal with anyway” because this organisation was so focused on its numbers it lost sight of what really mattered. This qualitative information was dismissed as just anecdotal and not consistent with data on the KPI scorecards, so therefore irrelevant.
Eventually, this quants-only approach to performance management drove the organisation to its knees.
Things might have been different if they’d applied an adage from Jeff Bezos: “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right”.
Or, as I might put it, numbers alone only get you so far. Beyond that point, you probably don’t need more numbers. You probably need more qualitative information, external to your organisation, because that’s usually where the real information lies.
I know I’ve kept you waiting far too long for this, but if you are still wondering what song I’m referring to it’s “Gentle On My Mind”. Originally written and performed by John Hartford, and made into a million-seller by Glen Campbell.
And if you’re wondering what the little tweak was that Glen Campbell made to achieve million-selling status, it’s this…he just played it a little bit faster.
If you need a reminder of the song, or want to reacquaint yourself with the joys of some banjo playing, you can find it here. (And the original version is here, if you want to compare and contrast.)