Its intersting that suddenly im reading a lot about over-measuring
Good things come in threes, and suddenly a new theme has entered my brain, I’m reading/hearing so much about over-measuring, being overly-result driven that it seems likely that my subconcious is trying to tell me something. Or at least, the fact that I found it interesting enough to write a blog post about that it must be some indication of its relevance to me and perhaps somebody reading this.
. The first was a radio interview on dutch radio with Rene ten Bos. Philosopher and organisation expert. ten Bos had written a book (“Stilte, geste, stem”) about how we are going too far with measuring perfomance in managment and how this is creating a great divide between the working professional and their managers. How this has infiltrated our whole society, even our very young children. You can listen to it here (again, dutch).
A few hours ago I came across a link to an interesting read about how statistics in games are detracting from the experience. The article focuses a bit on open world games but its not limited to that genre. In the single player campaign of killzone 3 for example. The latest game I have worked on, you get various trophies along the way. For things like finishing a certain part of the story, but also for things that have very little to do with the game (in my opinion) like reloading your gun a certain many times.
The third is an blog post from Sasha Dichter, I had read the article a few days ago, but because he linked to a post about Vibram’s five fingers shoes I never finished reading his post. I just got to the part aoburt the shoes, got sucked into trying to locate these things somewhere around Hilversum. Thus missing the whole point of his post (or at least the point he was trying to make a paragraph later). He started running again, and found all these cool toys that he would ahve loved 20 years ago. But he had started running for different reasons now, and the statisitcs that his gps smart phones was giving him about his achievements actually detremented from his enjoyment of the run. By the way, curious, how many got to this paragraph without getting distracted by the in article links?
All this wisdom, and I think it must be applicable to pretty much every part life.
What a balacne to strike with a very important notion in science and the technical part of my work. “Meten is weten” or “Measuring is knowing”.