By Linh Dang
With the topic of metrics coming up, I remember a folk story of a wise scholar who was challenged to weigh an elephant. No scale in that era was big enough for that, and so people thought it was impossible to weigh an elephant. Yet, he got the elephant onto the boat. When the boat had stabilized, he put a mark on the boat right at the edge of the water surface. After getting the elephant out, he asked his people to load rocks onto the boat until the water reached the mark again. The only thing he had to do then was to weigh the rocks individually and add up the numbers. This anecdote guided my understanding of Douglas Hubbard proposition on the “misunderstandings” that create the “illusion” of “immeasurability”, especially the concept of measurement and the methods. Like the layperson of an olden era, IT professionals can mistake “measurement” for the action of putting something through a scale – which can be a tool or a method – and they let their “scale” limit their ability to measure. As Hubbard has rightly pointed out, IT people have not been taught “empirical methods,” and thus might go beyond what they know and seek less concrete methods to generate data themselves. The article, and the anecdote, has renewed my commitment to diversifying my knowledge, practicing creativity, and deepening my understanding beyond what I can observe.
Source: https://www.cio.com/article/2438921/it-organization/everything-is-measurable.html
Leave a Reply