Measure Everything

Like many, I follow and enjoy Seth Godin’s marketing blog.  Most of his posts only tangentially relate to the work we do, but his recent post, “The scientific method” coincided and lined up with an interesting comment from a client.

Godin argues for a critical approach to thinking about your business and challenging the status quo.  “If you enter a conversation,” he says,  “looking for something to test, measure and ultimately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more competitive, and you continue to cycle past your competitors.’

Motherhood and apple pie, perhaps, but more often than not it isn’t done.

Corporate politics and fear are often reasons why managers and decision makers hesitate to measure what’s going on and confront what they learn, wherever it may lead.  But so is the lack of confidence that the important things can actually be measured.

We recently completed some work for a health care provider whom we helped assess retention rates for different groups of patients.  The CEO came from outside of the health care industry and was determined to  look at patient retention, though this had never been measured.  Now they know the characteristics of  patients that show better- or worse-than average retention behavior.  The next step is to identify and measure the actual reasons for patient attrition.