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Wisdom at Centrepoint: Einstein's judgement

Governance | 1 Sep 2007

In this series, a guest writer is asked to challenge current thinking. Anthony Lawton challenges those who want to measure everything and forget judgement.

Einstein once said that not everything that can be measured counts, and not everything that counts can be measured. We in the charity world should keep the insight in view as more and more people want us to account for our success and their money, and as we seek to make a difference in a world of performance management, quasi-markets, and charity involvement in public service delivery. What matters is the judgement of performance not merely, or sometimes at all, its measurement.

Of course, there are metrics that inform judgement. But we must all be aware of the limits of measurement. At Centrepoint we count the rent our residents have not paid; management performance is partly indicated by performance in collecting rent. However, the measurement of the pounds value of arrears does not itself allow me to judge the performance of a manager. Different young people with different histories and different lives hugely affect what happens: this affects what different managers and their teams can achieve. None of this is to deny the place of measurement in helping judge performance. But the measurement is not the judgement.

Ill-informed passion for measurement blights the quasi-markets we now find ourselves in. Inexperienced commissioning officers, concerned with their accountabilities and their backs, and misusing their power as sole purchasers in highly imperfect markets, want apparently waterproof rationales for choosing agency A over agency B. They construct elaborate scoring mechanisms, they compute scores, and substitute them for judgment. Contracts have been lost because one agency scored 0.47 of some metric more than another. In fact, such a difference is usually well within the margin of error of the measurement, even before we consider the intangibles that make up a service, and an organisation's capability to deliver it. The spurious scientism of measurement misapplied is substituted for judgment.

In the social welfare world Centrepoint inhabits, people talk of distance travelled, holding out the possibility of measuring with exactitude the journey from penniless living on the streets to self-sufficiency with a job, an income and a home. But a journey is much more than the distance travelled. One of the best journeys I ever made was on the Oslo to Bergen railway, one of the great railway journeys of the world. In recalling its excellence I never mention the miles travelled, or the speed we went at, or even the temperature! I talk of the breathtaking beauty of the views, the camaraderie of student travellers thrown together by chance, and the enjoyment of travelling straight back again because accommodation was free on the train! I offer grounds for my judgement of excellence and evidence for my claims. But none of my grounds are measurements.

I am for accountability, value-for-money, and rigorous assessment of the performance of charities and of people, teams and processes. But I am also for wisdom, for the weighing of evidence and the exercise of judgement. And I judge that Einstein counts!

Profile

Anthony Lawton is chief executive of Centrepoint, England's leading youth homelessness charity, and chair of Leicester Theatre Trust. He used to teach at Warwick Business School and Leicester University Management Centre. He has, he says, a field full of hobby-horses about running charity enterprises such as the hobby-horse ridden here. Recently delighted to accept the establishment appointment as an OBE, he notes that the colour and hue of some, but he hopes not all, of those hobby horses may have changed since his days in a band in Leicester called Midland Red.

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