I love to measure things. I can look up the temperature in my house for the last two years. Did you know it was 16.5 degrees Celsius on November 2, 2017, at 02:12 AM? I track the downloads of my book Doing It. 2736 downloads up and till 2018-05-20 7:02:00. I measure the steps I take every day, did you know I took 287.216 steps in October 2015? As I said, I love to measure things.
I hear you thinking… nice Ralph but how is this going to help me as a professional? Not. It is not going to help you. The more important question for me is, how is this going to help me as a professional or as a person?
Silence… I don’t know. I don’t see how the history of the temperature in my living room is going to improve my life. I don’t see how the number of steps from the past is going to improve my health in the future.
If you are a lead or manager, you probably need to create a report every week. Maybe you have automated it, and you created a dashboard. A dashboard where management can check the metrics of your team or organization. Regarding that dashboard, sorry to disappoint you, but I expect your manager hardly ever checks the dashboard.
Take a look at the report. Which data is there? Probably data that is easy to measure. Like the living room temperature, the steps I take, etc. We tend to create reports on things that we can measure easily. Often these measurements are related to output. Something happens, and some data is available. We call these indicators, lagging indicators.
Lagging indicators are often easier to measure, but it is hard to make a change in a process based on lagging indicators. For example, I measure the temperature in my living room, but the temperature is something that already happened. I can’t change it anymore. Measuring the number of new hires is also a lagging indicator. It already happened. You can’t influence the process anymore.
We also have leading indicators. Leading indicators say something about what is going to happen. For example, the temperature outside could be a leading indicator of the temperature in my living room. When the temperature outside is 35 Celsius or more, I know the temperature in my living room is also going to increase. If the influx of candidates is growing in an organization, I can expect the number of new hires also going to increase.
I will give you another example. I try to maintain a stable weight. A lagging indicator is measuring myself every day. It already happened, there is nothing I can change anymore. A leading indicator could be to measure my activities, and the food I eat during the day. These are leading indicators. I know when my activities decrease, the number calories increase, my weight will probably increase.
The question is when you look again at your dashboard or report, what kind of indicators do you have? Leading or lagging indicators?