Do we live in an age of measurement?

The headmaster of Eton College has said that an obsession with data is harming boarding schools.

Speaking at the Boarding Schools’ Association’s annual conference earlier this month, Tony Little said: “It is a sad thing, it seems to me, that where once men were able to speak of sweeps of history such as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, we now seem to inhabit the Age of Measurement… Our day-to-day lives are circumscribed by a variation of the McNamara fallacy: only that which can be measured has worth, if it cannot be measured it can have no worth. This kind of thinking cuts to the heart of everything I believe in as the head of a boarding school.”

Inspections have helped to bring improvements over the years, he said, but measurement “comes at a cost”, distorting the way staff and students work and putting short-term goals ahead of long-term success. Teachers have become more risk averse and pupils have worked out how to achieve the stated targets with the minimum effort.

In a commercial context, market researchers are the ones who have to justify the cost of measurement – both the money spent on it and the unintended consequences of how you choose to do it on how your business performs.

In recent years there has been growing pressure to demonstrate returns on investment in research – to measure your measurement. Little’s comments provide a warning that this sort of thinking can only go so far.

Market research is about making better decisions. But it’s not always easy to know what decisions you might have made, or what the consequences would have been, had it not been for the research. So for all its boardroom appeal, attaching a simple, numerical value to research can be misguided.

Tony Little says this sort of overemphasis on meeting targets is at odds with everything he believes in. Before relying too much on measurement for reassurance, buyers of research need to consider what they believe in too. Putting your customer at the heart of your business. Basing your decisions on evidence. Staying alert to change. There’s value there that everyone can understand.