need to remind ourselves of the significant risk that in the process key details and subtleties may well be overlooked. Or be written in such small font size that you don’t pay attention to them.
We must also take a moment to remind ourselves that what someone else has deemed important may not be what matters most to us, or what will really make a difference to the decision we make.
So next time you’re looking at a PowerPoint presentation, or indeed any type of executive summary, look beyond the large font and the bold headline points. The information you actually need may be somewhat more buried. Or it may not even be on the slides at all. Do also put your presenter on the spot. If it matters, ask them to clarify and expand, and provide more information.
If you don’t, you risk being shown only tigers, and never snakes.
The Cult of the Measurable
It’s not only particular forms of presentation that can blinker our vision.
One type of information often dominates our attention – numbers. This in itself can be problematic.
Numbers can give us critical information – if we want to know whether to put a coat on, we’ll look at the temperature outside; if we want to know how well our business is doing, we’ll need to keep an eye on revenues and expenditures; and if we want to be able to compare the past with the future, we’ll need standard measures to do so.
But the problem is that the Cult of the Measurable means that things that can’t really be measured are sometimes given numerical values.21
Can a wine really be 86 per cent ‘good’? That doesn’t sound right to me, but one multi-billion-dollar industry doesn’t agree. Robert Parker, probably the most famous wine critic in the world, ranks wines on a scale between fifty and one hundred. And winemakers prostrate themselves before him, praying for a rating of ninety-two or above, because such a number practically guarantees commercial success, given how influential Parker’s ratings have become with wine drinkers.22
Yet what really is the difference between a rating of ninety-two and an eighty-six? How can we tell what that six-point difference means?
And are someone else’s tastes necessarily going to correlate with yours? I’ve already raised the question of whether Joe from Idaho on TripAdvisor is really the best person to steer your choice as to where to go on holiday. We also need to ask ourselves whether what I mean by four stars is what you mean by four stars. Whether my Zagat score of twenty means the same as yours. As the Financial Times’s wine critic Jancis Robinson points out on the subject of Parker’s influence, ‘Make no mistake about it, wine judging is every bit as subjective as the judging of any art form.’23
So, before you make a decision based on a number, think about what the number is capturing, and also what it is not telling you.
Risk is another area where our attempts to assign clear measures are often bound to fail. While it’s true that there are some areas where we can meaningfully quantify risk – such as engineering, where we can come up with a number for how likely a building is to withstand an earthquake, say; or medicine, where we can estimate a patient’s chance of responding to a particular drug – this approach doesn’t work effectively in all spheres. Indeed, in our turbocharged world, in which changes happen quicker and less predictably than ever before, many of our attempts to assign probabilities to future events are likely to be pretty meaningless. As President Obama said, reflecting on the huge range of probabilities that various senior intelligence folk had proffered back in March 2011 as to whether Osama bin Laden was the ‘high value target’ spotted within a high-walled compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan – with confidence levels that ranged between 30 and 95 per cent – ‘What you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.’24
In our desire to reduce everything to some sort of standardised measure, to create universal meanings for things that will always be subjective, and to create the illusion of certainty when uncertainty is in fact what prevails, do we not risk making decisions on the basis of what may seem intelligence-rich information, but is in truth pretty meaningless?
Not everything can be measured, not everything can be compared, especially in a world as complex as ours. Indeed, Obama, realising this, responded to the various probabilities he’d been presented with, ‘Look guys, this is a flip of the coin. I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.’25 A flip of the coin which we now know that President Obama won and Osama bin Laden lost.
All That Counts
Another danger of putting the measurable on a pedestal is that what cannot be measured often ends up being discarded, or dismissed. But just because something can’t be quantified, it doesn’t mean that we should ignore what it is telling us.
A conversation with a senior director of a multi-billion-dollar international children’s charity brought this point home to me in a stark way. Huddled in a Cambridge University antechamber, encircled by six of her colleagues, Ms Broun explained that the key problem children now face in many middle-income countries was domestic violence.26 She and her colleagues knew this, because they had personally witnessed countless cases of children bearing marks of physical abuse alongside symptoms of mental strain. They’d heard their stories, seen their scars, and noted their teachers’ and community leaders’ corroborating stories.
Domestic violence, however, is hard to measure. What do you record? The number of bruises? How can you capture in numbers how terrified a child feels? As a result, Ms Broun had been unable to convince the organisation’s head office that domestic violence was something vital for them to target. Instead she was told to focus her efforts on addressing problems for which they could collect numbers, and thereby easily gauge progress on – problems such as under-attendance at school, or children without sufficient vaccinations.
These instructions were given to Ms Broun despite the fact that in middle-income nations, such measurable and easily trackable problems had to a great extent been resolved, whereas domestic violence was active and growing.
In many ways it’s hard to accept this story. It speaks of bureaucratic intransigence and rigidity, and it’s also symptomatic of the way in which the Cult of the Measurable can overshadow what really needs to be seen, and what really needs doing. In this case it is incredibly painful, because the happiness and welfare of children is at stake. If the over-importance of numbers can become embedded in this kind of situation, where in your business or personal life could the Cult of Comfortable Measurement be adversely affecting your decisions?27
By devaluing that which cannot be measured, we risk not only making poorer decisions, but also distorting our priorities and goals. As was once said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’28
Glass Half Full
So we need to be careful about focusing excessively on numbers, or on things in bold typeface, or on the information that others deem most relevant for us, or that glitters most brightly. We also need to start paying more attention to people’s stories and testimonies, even if they cannot be quantified.
Beyond this, there’s another type of information we should watch out for that is prone to draw us in – information we want to hear, over information we don’t.
Neuroscientist Tali Sharot explored this theme by putting volunteers in a brain scanner and asking them what they believed the chances were of various unpleasant events occurring