Seth Godin got me thinking about measurement with his recent blog “Messing with Strathern’s Law.” Here’s the main idea:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Marilyn Strathern expanded on Charles Goodhart’s comment about monetary policy and turned it into a useful law of the universe. As soon as we try to manipulate behaviors to alter a measure, it’s no longer useful. – Seth Godin, September 21, 2021

The simple point is that when people know what and how you’re measuring something, they can alter their behavior without necessarily achieving the measurement’s goal. One of the many references in the articles I read about Strathern’s law was a new book by Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics. He tells terrifying stories about how surgeons refuse to operate on really sick people because if they die, it degrades their success rates, for example. I’ll write more on this tomorrow.

The larger question becomes, do we measure what matters? Here’s a fascinating paragraph buried in a story about this year’s New York Yankees, who, as I write, have squeaked into the Major League Baseball playoffs. The wild card playoff is tonight. But here’s the paragraph:

[After a disastrous half-inning on defense] the Yankees stepped up to the plate. First baseman Anthony Rizzo ripped a double that left his bat at 115.2 mph. Outfielder Aaron Judge followed it with a double measured at 118.4 mph. Outfielder Giancarlo Stanton delivered the final blow, blasting a 448-foot home run that soared over the Green Monster and out of the ballpark. There are seven major-league teams that haven’t hit a ball this season with an exit velocity of 115 mph or greater, including the 100-win San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers. Rizzo, Judge and Stanton all hit balls that hard in consecutive plate appearances. – Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2021. 

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: in this year’s regular season, the Giants and the Dodgers won 15 and 14 more games than the Yankees, respectively, and they have no batters that have hit the ball more than 115 mph this year. So what difference does it make that the Yankees have a couple of guys who have hit it that hard? It’s an example of measuring something that we now have the technology to measure but that apparently doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t seem to add to the bottom line of actually winning games.

Jesus told us to make disciples at a time when there were no organized churches that met in buildings. Now we have huge buildings (in some cases), and therefore we count:

• The size of our buildings
• The number of people who come to these buildings
• How much these people give

Buildings, bodies, bucks. But have we made any disciples? And how would we count them or measure their quality? Questions worth thinking about. Let’s continue the discussion tomorrow.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28.18 – 20, ESV)