Lies. Damn lies and Statistics…

Regular readers may have noticed that I’m quite keen on rugby and these days follow things reasonably closely.  I wasn’t there to witness out first home game; one which was always going to be both tough and telling if we want to challenge for the title this year.  It turned out to be a total rout so I wasn’t so sad to have been elsewhere.  Both pundits and fans agreed this was a total disaster from the Quin’s perspective.  A few days later I got this analysis of the game through.  It is a very accurate and scientific description of what happened based on GPS data and computer analysis.  The thing is, if you read these stats, you will notice that Harlequins had more carries, made more metres, beat more defenders, passed more and made more offloads than Saracens.  Usually the coaches would be thrilled with this but we lost and lost badly!

It kind of makes my point beautifully.  Change programs usually come with a set of measures to keep them on track.  Measure the wrong thing and you get the wrong behaviour and the wrong result…. like us you lose!  Measurement is crucial but you better measure the right things.  These ‘hard’ factual measures ignore the ‘soft’ more subjective measures that the fans made intuitively, we were rubbish.  Be careful what you measure.  Be careful how you report ‘facts’ to your people, because they, like the fans, know instinctively whether they reflect the truth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2014 at 16:45 and is filed under Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.