It was a Seth Godin blog that got me thinking about measurement. Here was his opening line:

“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

Researching Strathern’s Law, I uncovered all kinds of ways to mess up with measurement. For example, “the Cobra Effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentionally rewards people for making the issue worse.” What’s the Cobra Effect, you ask?

The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased. – Wikipedia

You can’t make this stuff up. Another one, probably more directly relevant to this blog about discipleship is the McNamara Fallacy:

The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamra, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven. Daniel Yankelovich has this analysis (bullets are mine):

• The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
• The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
• The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness.
• The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.— Daniel Yankelovich, “Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business” (1972).

The McNamara fallacy is unintentionally practiced by most churches. No one would say that discipleship isn’t important. We just don’t know how to measure it. Therefore, we rely on buildings, bodies, and bucks, as I wrote on Tuesday. We also tend to rely on events. I recently met Tony Morgan, founder of The Unstuck Group, a consulting service for churches. He wrote a nice piece about events, which opens this way:

Attendance to events doesn’t reveal health in a ministry. Have you ever considered that keeping people busy at your events may prevent them from spending more time on their marriage, children and/or relationships with non-believers?

We must be wary of reducing the faith to attendance at church. There may be times when an event is strategic, but we can become lazy in relying on events to be the litmus test of our ministry. – Tony Morgan, Do Your Events Improve Church Health?

I’ve always observed that churches seem to assess an event as successful if:

• It takes a lot of people to put on.
• It is attended by even more people.
• Everyone goes away with a good feeling.

By contrast, Tony Morgan suggested in another piece about events that an event should be helping people take the next step after the event rather than just getting people to show up to the event. More of Tony’s event assessment ideas are in this handout: Healthy Versus Unhealthy Events.

All I’m suggesting in these measurement posts is that think about what we’re doing and how we can measure the right kind of success. How we measure may even drive what we do or how we do it. More on that tomorrow.

You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. (Daniel 5.27, ESV)