Measurement & Observation

“To achieve understanding, it is not necessary to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.”

- Giorgio Morandi

Morandi was an Italian artist whose work focused on humble, everyday objects such as pots and pans and kettles and bottles, but through his keen sense of observation and experiencing, he brought to life stories that were waiting to be heard.

In the age of data, it is easy to get lost in the melee of everything that is there to be seen. We measure everything we can because we want to control something else that seems to have a mind of its own.

Measurement can easily give us the illusion of control and a taste of what every leader/ manager is always looking for – certainty.

The assurance that tomorrow, things will turn out like they did today (or a little better) is what we all want to go to bed with. We buy this assurance by mining more and more data and adding more columns in our project plans.

This is not to belittle measurement – it is often our first, and in many cases the only refuge to get some understanding about what’s happening around us; in our teams, with our systems and so on.

Equally, it is important to recognize this. Measurement is necessary, but not always adequate. And, a doing lot of measurement cannot fill the gap of what we are yet to understand.

In other words, great measurement can never compensate for poor observation.

And that’s where the genius of artists like Morandi shines through.

If we can look long enough at what’s in front of us and are courageous enough to listen to what it might say, we may very well be surprised. But we hesitate from doing that for two reasons.

Firstly, because we don’t have the time. We need the answer now; we need an answer; any answer.

Second, we secretly know we may not like what shows up (which is why we refrain from observing hard in the first place).