There was a wonderful two part experiment conducted in a grocery store. In part 1 the public were offered 24 jams to taste, and to buy if interested. In part 2 they were given the chance to taste only six jams. Needless to say, more people availed themselves of the samples when 24 were on offer. But these groups were each given a discount voucher to use at the check out if they wanted to buy any of the jam flavors. However, each voucher was coded differently the experimenters found they made more money when they offered a smaller selection.
I first heard about this on a Freakonomics podcast. The tenets of the experiment, the ‘paradox of choice’ as it’s sometimes called, are challenged elsewhere, including here on Medium if you want to read more. However, what stood out for me was how guilty we are of measuring the easy thing, and missing the metric that’s truly important.
I come across this problem frequently in my job, managing change by encouraging people to adopt different behaviors. All of us will have seen it through the coronavirus as we watch the headline figures showing number of cases, number of hospitalizations, and, awfully, he number of deaths. These are lagging indicators, they are commonly at the end of the time line, and by the time we’re measuring them it’s already too late. But what are the leading indicators? Leading indicators are are harder to measure, but if we effect them we can make a difference because these usually speak to behavior. If we can measure leading indicators, like inclination to wear a face mask, or appetite for social distancing, and if we can adopt tactics to improve these leading indicators, we can drive down the lagging metrics of to help us remain within our hospitals’ ICU capacity, and drive down mortality. The latter is just regrettably easier to measure.
And so we come to Medium. I will confess I’m far too guilty of subscribing to many writers promoting tactics to garner popularity on Medium. Each has devised the formula for success, where success is measured by how much you get the clap. (There’s a cream for that.) Popularity is enticing, and can be financially rewarding, but I believe there is a bigger community of authors writing for a metric that isn’t so easily measured. Someone may read their posts, the reader may not even acknowledge it but they may yet absorb the content, benefit from it, use it to help themselves or, better still, to allow it to help or inspire others. Then that writing will not only have given the authors the warm fuzzies we all get when we give life to our thoughts, they will have made a meaningful difference, even if data on that difference is hard to measure. Keep your warm fuzzies coming, and don’t worry about getting the clap.
