If It Can't Be Measured, It Must Be Really Important

In business, I'd be laughed out of the office with such a claim. Everyone in business (and among a number of church leaders) knows that it's supposed to go this way:

"If it can't be measured, It doesn't exist."

Those words have never sat well with me, but usually my beef was that there are important things that are hard to measure. Love, just for openers, right?

But a few days ago my brother directed me toward a TED talk (given by Brene Brown) that began with this fabled business nostrum. And then the woman went on to discuss, for some twenty minutes, topics of vital importance. Vulnerability. Gratitude. Joy. Belief.

None of these things could be measured. Not one.

And the more I reflected on it, the more I came to the conviction that the business claim didn't merely fall short of reality. It literally is flip-flopped with reality. It's not sorta off the mark. It's wildly off the mark.

That's not to say that nothing that is measurable matters. Far from it. The business claim arose because we've discovered how many things in life can be improved if we just start measuring things and paying attention to the numbers.

Fair enough. And true.

But if we look closely at those things we can improve by those means, they are peripheral things to what is, at core, most important about life itself. Paying attention to the numbers when examining immunological results may result in a better vaccine. Too true. But the thing that matters more is the lives we were trying to save in the first place.

As if to drive this thought home, the next TED talk that walked, uninvited, into my browser space, dove right into the heart of what I'm trying to say.

As Brene Brown's talk wound down, TED.com flipped me to the next talk in the queue. In this next video, Barry Schwartz spoke on the loss of wisdom.

Mr. Schwartz began his talk by projecting on screen a list of the duties (all quite measurable) that a hospital janitor needs to perform.

There was nothing surprising about the list of duties. Mop the floor. Empty the trash cans. Etc. etc.

But then Schwartz pointed out that none of the duties in the list made reference to any other human being. Not one. "The janitor's job could be done in a mortuary just as well as in a hospital."

But Schwartz then began to explain the sorts of things on that list that janitor's did or didn't do. And why.

The janitor who didn't mop the floor because patient X was trying to relearn how to walk and needed a dry hallway.

The janitor who didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because exhausted family members on vigil were presently napping there.

Some quibbler could try to quantify and codify better janitorial instructions, but that would be to miss the point. Matters of the heart cannot be measured. But you can tell who is listening to the whispers of wisdom. They will do their job better than anyone overly focused on the numbers.

I have work to do today. I'm behind on that work. Is the time spent on this blog well spent? Good luck answering that one.

But if the time spent putting these thoughts down helps me to remember that unmeasurable things are generally the most important ones, that will make this blogging excursion a profitable one. I will hopefully (like those janitors) drop my job the moment I hear the whisper of God telling me I need to do something that nobody is measuring.

Not with numbers, anyway.