Return on Intention

Global warming is a topic that gets  lot of air time. I’ve seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it sounded very convincing. I’ve also heard that the reason for the temperatures rising doesn’t have anything to do with global warming, but have more to do with outside circumstances surrounding the measurement tools used to collect the data. Personally, I think that paying attention to our impact on the environment and reducing our consumption of energy is the right thing to do whether we have a threat of  becoming extinct or not, but global warming isn’t really the point of this post. Accurate measurement is.

The saying goes “You care about what you measure”, after all how can you improve something if you don’t know how your doing with it, or whether your getting better or worse at it. In this example, climate change is what you care about, so its measured. To get a measurement you need a tool for collecting data and a system for analyzing that data into meaning. If you want to increase your businesses sales, you have to track the sales over time. This will tell you whether or not your improving or not. This doesn’t help much on its own, you also need to know what changes have taken place that can be used to explain the movement of the trend. A big problem with trying to identify the actions that cause the changes are to figure out what actually makes a difference and what doesn’t.

Assume that I try to see what has caused a 10% increase in my sales. The first thing I notice is that on the days my sales increased I wore a blue tie. I might be tempted to mandate that all sales people wear blue ties. While there is some data that indicates the color of your clothing can have an impact on how people perceive you and therefor have an impact on whether or not they want to do business with you, it is not a proven fact that my blue tie has anything to do with my performance. It might just as likely be true that I happen to wear my blue tie on the sames days that the state employees get their paychecks, so they are more apt to buy because they have the money now. So what impacts the increased sales, the tie or the cash on hand.

The most believable story I have heard against global warming is that the thermometers used to gather the temperature readings  are located near airports in most major cities. When the airports where built they were located outside of the city. As the cities grew, the large amount of concrete and asphalt from the city development crept closer to the where the temperature readings where taken. The concrete and asphalt held the heat from the day longer and raised the temperature of the immediate environment making the readings of the thermometers higher than they were previously. Whether or not this is actually the case, it illustrates the errors that can occur in metric gathering and analyzing. Check your metric gathering tools and see what other elements could effect its readings or your analysis of them.