I was reading an article in ‘Utility week’ over the past few days with the title ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. Drucker and Deming said something similar to this and as much as I could get into a debate around how this statement might have a few holes in it, in the context of what I read, it did get me thinking.

The premise of the article was around Severn Trent discovering that their current way of measuring omissions from wastewater treatment works is flawed and they needed a different method. I realise it’s a lot more technical than this but I won’t pretend to be an expert in how it all works. The article went on to describe how they had formed a new way of measuring that was more accurate and were working with other organisations on the international stage to get this right.

So what?

This little paragraph sums it up for me…

“The light bulb moment came when they realised emissions from nitrous oxide and methane are far worse than previously thought. Initially we thought, wow that is quite alarming, but it’s much better to know.” – Utility Week – Feb (Ruth Williams)

This led to 2 thoughts for me.

Fair play for flushing this out

Not just in the water sector but in almost all sectors, there has and can be a tendency to cover stories like this up, due to their capacity to generate ‘bad news’. You can imagine the headlines and I won’t write them here. Personally, I believe this is a great example of what the sector needs. When I read this, as a Customer of ‘water’, I heard something along the lines of….

“wow, we’ve been measuring this, this way for ages. We had a huge blind spot and hold up our hands. Now we’ve found it we’re going to act and here’s what we’re going to do. We committing to doing the RIGHT thing”.

When I read this, and Severn Trent are not my water company, I felt my level of ‘trust’ in what they are doing go up a little. Obviously, one article doesn’t change the whole dynamic but by demonstrating vulnerability and acting positively this grows more confidence in the leadership at work. 

Assumptions in Performance levels!!

We spend a lot of time helping people to learn about measurement. One element of that being the quality of your ‘measurement system’. In this case the current one was built on a load of assumptions which ended up failing and led to a discovery that the numbers being looked at weren’t worth the spreadsheet they were captured in.

Obviously, this is a big one given the context. It’s important for Net Zero, the environment, overall regulatory performance (if we fast forward maybe?). Let’s not stop there though. Given my time spent with water companies, there are a lot of measures. They are ALL subject to this same problem. A failure of the measurement system.

More often than not, I see measures where the data used to create information and make decisions is taken as good enough without any thought to whether it actually is, given the context its used in. Measurement systems can be highly variable, extremely inaccurate and a pain in the arse to understand. Often, as the people in the article go on to talk about, you have to bring these things into the light and going to observe and understand what really goes on in the work is the missing ingredient that either validates or invalidates the dashboard you have been looking at for the past 5 years.

We could talk about ‘measures’ all day but we’ll leave it here for now.

Hopefully, this gets you thinking around such an important subject. Thanks to Ruth Williams for writing that article.