Douglas Hubbard invented Applied Information Economics and wrote How to Measure Anything. In 2016 I asked him how you would measure something everyone agrees is unmeasurable. He asked me how I would measure collaboration, and I gave him the answer everybody gives: count the messages.
Ten years later that is still the answer, it is still wrong, and now it is on a dashboard with the word AI at the top of it.
This episode is an interview from my archive, recut with a new introduction and close. It predates ChatGPT, copilots, and any AI budget anyone had to defend to a board, which is the reason to play it now rather than a caveat about it. Nothing in it needed updating.
In this episode:
Why there is no such thing as a statistically significant sample size
Why you have more data than you think and need less than you think
How to define what you are measuring by the decision it changes, not the thing you can count
Why refusing to price a human life just means pricing it badly and in secret
Why you are worse at confidence than you think, and how half a day fixes it
Douglas Hubbard: howtomeasureanything.com
Audio only this week. Full transcript and every surface: https://sigsub.show/episodes/ep-007/
