We Don’t Trust What We Can’t Count, Even If It’s the Most Important Thing

One of the problems we have when we make policy and create business strategy is that a lot of the social skills we are aware of in our regular lives go out the door because we want to rely on things that we can count and measure.  And so in the policy world, the things that can be counted and modeled matter a lot.  Everything else gets dropped away.  

For example, in education, we pay a lot of attention to grades and SAT scores and that’s tremendously important, but what really explains why some people succeed and why other don’t is the individual relationship between the teacher and the student.  It’s really tough to count the quality of relationships and yet that’s the most important thing.  

And so those things, because we can’t count them, we somehow don’t trust them. I think that’s true in corporations and anywhere else. It’s the quality of the relationship, it’s the quality of the space that’s between people more than the individual traits that people bring to the office.  And yet that thing which we call culture, which is sort of the zeitgeist, the feel of an atmosphere is really hard to count and measure, and very hard to put into numbers.  And yet it tends to be the most important thing.

60 Second Reads are recorded directly from experts in Big Think’s studio. 

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