If you treasure it measure it!

If you treasure it measure it!

Who of our readers plays tennis? Well probably not that much anymore since tennis is a sport of the 80s. But at the same time some of us Fingertippers (*cough, our founder, *cough) are children of the 80s and like to play this wonderful racket sport in their free time.

You probably wonder what decisions and tennis have in common or if you have arrived at the wrong website. But fear not, this is still Fingertip and what decisions and tennis have in common is that both are difficult to measure quality wise. What means bad quality in tennis? Well, if the ball is out it was somewhat bad quality, and what means bad quality in a decision? Probably if the decision results in revenue loss.

Now in tennis it has been long challenging to accurately measure if a ball was really out or not. So far existing game tracking solutions have been able to serve only top professional tournaments. But now a Finnish company called Zenniz is bringing automatic game tracking to every tennis centre and player in the world with wireless sensor technologies and related signal processing. Tennis has been played for generations and only now are getting to accurate measuring.

But the same is true in organizations, and we can tell you especially in startups. Measuring usually comes last. First we put processes in place and then we try to introduce some sort of measuring system retroactively. Some call itKPIs (key performance indicators), some have WIGs (widely important goals) and yet others operate based on OKRs(objectives and key results). However, whatever you are measuring you are doing it retroactively and you will face the challenge that the decisions you in effect try to measure are frankly put, all over the place.

It’s time we start to stick some proverbial wireless sensors around our decisions and start to find new and creative solutions that can measure the quality of decisions. We need to define which signals we want to measure, for example is the duration it took to reach a decision an important parameter? How do you measure your decisions in your organization?

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