Heisenberg s Uncertainty Principle

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

You are being urged to help your team develop a system of metrics so that they know the score. You want to be able to present evidence to others in the organization that the team-based change effort you are assisting is working. A word of caution: You cannot truly prove that things are objectively working or not working. Teams and organizations obviously do not live in scientific laboratories. Many factors are influencing every outcome you desire . In addition, all measurements are to some degree subjective , even so-called scientific measurements. Werner Heisenberg, the scientist who founded quantum mechanics, showed that when we try to measure things, we change them. The old Newtonian version of physics assumed that the "real world" existed independently of our observations. Heisenberg discovered that each concept has a meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure it. So no measurement is truly objective.

Your team's efforts to measure productivity, quality, team process effectiveness, morale , and so on will all have subjective elements associated with them. Your team should have discussions on what determines "quality" and how it should be measured. Such discussions help focus a team's energy and inspire a group to pull together. However, measurements drive behaviors; anything the group pays attention to causes changes. As a result of paying attention to scrap rates, will the team pay less attention to the costs of tooling? As a result of measuring satisfaction, will the team be less disciplined at team meetings and allow members to express themselves on any topic regardless of the current agenda topic? So be sure your team considers the implications of the metrics it chooses to record on its scorecard.

Perfection is impossible there will be a downside to every good measurement strategy chosen . Just try to anticipate the implications and make decisions. There are trade-offs for every choice made. Yes, some measurements will have a more obvious subjective element, but just make sure the data on that element are gathered systematically. The point is to help the team determine if it is getting better or worse , not to determine if it doing good or bad in absolute terms.