Throwing the Flag

Those who follow sports know that the quality of officiating is receiving much needed and overdue attention. In fact, there is one officiating team in NCAA Football that is currently sitting on the bench for terrible calls in very important games. In fact, the poor officiating may have determined the winners and losers. Sports are a great place to talk about poor measurement because we’ve all seen it. With the advent of better technology and high definition instant replays some of the boo-boos are much more evident. Competent people in the business of evaluating performance of any type are very aware of the impacts of measurement and very skeptical of any decisions people make …. Measurement issues surround us …. I used the word competent intentionally because those that don’t pay serious attention to the quality of measurement and render opinions, advice, or recommendations on data or information are dangerous people to have on board.

Let’s stay with college football for a little longer. Bad calls lead to new conditions that redefine all of the subsequent plays. Some calls don’t end up having terrible consequences, but others do. (Apply these points to everything else … work, play, health, safety, purchases, promotions, politics, war ….) Let’s take the bad call that changed the outcome of the game.

• Rankings changed among the competing teams
• Who played at bowls changed along with the commensurate compensation and attention?  Also, all of the people who went to bowls changed, … , the travel, vacations, and lots of other secondary and tertiary order effects.
• Coaches got fired, hired or moved. Lots of the press chimed in labeling winners and losers.  Life changing events took place ….
• Different kids got recruited by different coaches…..  And on and on and on….. the dominoes keep falling …
• This was due to just one bad call (measurement) that changed the game, just one game.

Apply that to any professional sport, the gambling industry, and the lives of the happy and despondent whose lives revolve around the sport … it continues. There is good and bad from all of this …but it is different. So the better team doesn’t always win, and it wasn’t from poor performance….

Now, how about business performance? Have we considered just how much is impacted by poor measurement?  How many big and small decisions alike were made on the shoulders of a bad call? Was the bad call on the shoulders of bad information or data? How about performance appraisals, promotions, demotions and the like? Any capital spending decisions made on poor data? Did we ever spend bundles fixing something that wasn’t broken beacuse our data was crap?

Sports are changing and some for the better as our measurements improve.

How about what we do?