There’s a book I love, “How To Measure Anything” (I’ve mentioned it here in the newsletter before, come to think of it). It’s about how we think of measurement as the application of precision, rather than the reduction of uncertainty, and thus push many things out of the realm of measurement.

Think of a bolt on your toilet. 0.85368 centimeters wide. Sounds pretty precise, right?

But all it’s saying is that it doesn’t matter if the bolt is 0.853682 or 0.853684.

In other words, that measurement, which on the one hand can be seen as a mark of precision, was actually just someone saying, “Yeah, whatever, that’s good enough, more doesn’t really matter.”

My field is communications. Presentation skills and public speaking, to be precise (no pun intended, although maybe I should look into why I used that phrase). It is often put into the “soft skills” bucket, where other things, like engineering, or production, get put into the “hard skills” bucket.

Why do we do that? Maybe because others do it too, or our boss tells us to.

But what cost are we paying for that? Because our existing mindset pushes “soft skills” out of the realm of measurement, we demote them. Not because they are less important, but simply because our existing mindset does not facilitate their measurement.

What’s that saying? “What gets measured gets improved.”