Much of metrics are blunt and insensitive tools for sensing the meaningfulness of life. – C. Thi Nguyen
Imagine that you are fly fishing on a beautiful clear stream in the mountains, cool breezes caress your face and the water gently flows past, bird song in the air. The goal of fly fishing is to catch a fish. But that’s not the reason we do it. In fact, many throw the fish back into the water. They know the real point of fly fishing is to be on the water – to enjoy nature, to be in that Zen space of quiet and calm. It’s not about how many fish you catch.
This is an example used by C. Thi Nguygen in his book, The Score : How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It demonstrates a kind of activity in life where the goal of the sport, game, or pursuit is not about winning, nor scoring the most points – but the process of the activity itself. The play.
Nguygen is a philosopher at Utah State University – he is also a serious gamer. He asserts that when we establish standards (metrics) that create a fixed scoring system, or goal, for activities – we often take away the fun. An example is skateboarding – now an Olympic sport. The height of a trick, the number or rotations – those can be measured more easily, but are the aesthetics then diminished? How does one quantify the grace, the flow, the creative spirit that is of equal value to the artistry of the skateboarder? What happened to skateboarding as just a way of having fun?
Nguygen goes on to discuss the concept of public transparency. These are standardized metrics that allow for comparison across organizations like universities and colleges. Acceptance rates, retention, salaries earned upon graduation – these are all numbers that we may use to measure one school against its peers and competitors.
From the outside these types of easily countable metrics make sense. They seem objective and neutral to a non-expert (perhaps, a legislator?). A simple example Nguyen uses is Charity Navigator, a site that provides a simple “Return on Investment” metric to compare charitable organizations. The ROI calculates internal overhead costs against monies spent externally. The problem, Nguyen suggests, is the presumption that internal costs (salaries, expertise) are wasted dollars. While the metric seems reasonable to us as outsiders, those who understand the domain recognize the limits. The danger, then, is that this kind of transparency may force experts to change what they do to “up” the numbers. Transparency then undermines expertise. This is what he calls “value capture.”
Those of us in library assessment publish transparency metrics as well, although not with the same consequences as our parent institutions. We count things that are easy to count – the number of patrons coming through our doors, the number of books checked out, the number of articles downloaded.
What if we included in our assessment not just the metric, or goal, but the process part of our work? This might be the impact of our research consultations or the efficiencies with which we process an interlibrary loan. How might we place more value in the practice of continuous improvement – that habit of regularly asking what’s working and what we might do better?
Efficiencies, innovation, and relationship-building are more difficult to measure in quantitative ways, but experts know this is the real meaning of our work. While standard metrics provide for easily countable benchmarks, the practice of seeking continuous improvement serves to move us beyond “business as usual.” This is what gives us our true purpose.
Box office returns only look like a good measure of art if you don’t know much about art. C. Thi Nguyen