On lions, antelopes, half-full glasses, and the remarkable difficulty of fitting a human being into a metric

Volker Pispers once told a story about a lion.

The lion is hungry, hunts an antelope, eats his fill, and then lies down in the sun. He stays there until he gets hungry again.

A fairly straightforward economic model, really.

Then along comes the human being.

The human looks at the lion and immediately spots considerable room for optimisation.

Why does it take him so long to catch one antelope? Couldn’t he make his hunting more efficient? If he increased his productivity and killed several antelopes in the same amount of time, he could build up a reserve.

For that, of course, he would need a refrigerator.

The refrigerator needs electricity. It has to stand somewhere. The supplies need to be managed. And before long, the lion is busy all day increasing his productivity so that one day he can afford to lie around comfortably in the sun again.

In other words, roughly what he was doing in the first place.

The lion clearly knew nothing about business management.

He did, however, have time.

There is one participant in this whole story whose opinion is conspicuously rarely requested:

the antelope.

For the lion, the hunt was a success.

For the antelope, it was a particularly bad day.

At this point, however, the English language deprives us of a perfectly good piece of nonsense.

In German, the animal is called Antilope, which can be cheerfully misread as Anti-Lope: something that is firmly opposed to a Lope. This immediately raises two questions: What exactly is a Lope, and what has the antelope got against it?

If Lope happened to sound even remotely like lion in some dialect, the matter would be settled. The antelope would then be the only animal whose attitude towards being eaten was already contained in its name.

English, unfortunately, refuses to cooperate. It calls the animal an antelope, thereby depriving it of its opposition and, quite possibly, its political identity.

Etymologically, of course, the German joke is nonsense.

But good nonsense.

And it leads to a perfectly serious question:

How much does our description of an event depend on whom we ask about it?

The optimist says:

“The glass is half full.”

The pessimist says:

“The glass is half empty.”

The business consultant says:

“The glass is 50 percent too large.”

All three are looking at the same glass.

And the consultant may even have done the maths correctly.

He just hasn’t asked whether anyone is thirsty.

This is a problem that extends well beyond drinking glasses.

We like to measure things.

We count, compare, evaluate, and compile statistics. We measure costs, benefits, utilisation, productivity, processing times, staffing requirements, absenteeism, and outcomes.

That makes sense.

Without numbers, we could neither run a business nor plan a hospital, evaluate a school, or draw up a national budget.

The number is not the problem.

The problem begins when the number starts mistaking itself for reality.

Eventually, the consultant is standing there with his 42, unable to understand why the world somehow fails to recognise itself in it.

His answer may be perfectly correct.

It is still worth checking occasionally whether it belongs to the question.

Anyone who has ever dealt with evaluations knows the problem.

You can count participants, qualifications, costs, hours, outcomes.

You can turn them into wonderful tables and, if you are particularly ambitious, colourful charts.

But quantity is not the same thing as quality.

And when it comes to quality of life, things become thoroughly inconvenient.

That is the annoying thing about quality of life:

it stubbornly refuses to become a proper metric.

As long as we are talking about a glass, we can laugh about it.

Things become more difficult when the metric describes a human being.

Care can be broken down into metrics remarkably well.

A human being cannot.

You can count how many people are being cared for, how many carers are on duty, how many tasks have been completed, how many medications administered, meals served, and procedures documented.

And of course much of this needs to be counted and documented. Handing out medication according to gut feeling and estimating at dinner whether everyone probably got something would hardly be a convincing alternative.

But a person can be washed, dressed, cared for, and fully documented –

and still have spent hours wanting to go home.

Older people who are confused or living with dementia do not always know why they are in a particular place. “I want to go home” does not necessarily mean an address. It can mean longing for familiarity, for someone with whom they shared decades of their life, or for a world in which they still knew their way around.

Every required task may have been completed in the records.

Every box may have been ticked.

And the person still does not know why they are here.

So what is good care?

Doesn’t it also include a conversation that serves no billable purpose?

A few minutes in which someone listens. In which a human being is not managed, but noticed.

That is harder to count.

What cannot be measured does not cease to exist.

Sometimes something goes unmeasured precisely because it has already had an effect.

When people are threatened, harassed, or attacked, we can count incidents, reports, legal proceedings, cases handled by counselling services. Those are important numbers.

Things become more difficult with the people who have learned to avoid the problem.

Someone who no longer dares to go to a certain place will no longer be attacked there. Someone who keeps quiet is less likely to be harassed for expressing an opinion. Someone who stops openly showing something about themselves for fear of the reaction may thereby reduce their personal risk.

To the statistics, this can look like encouraging progress.

For the person, their world has become smaller.

The metric can improve while freedom declines.

That is one of the peculiar traps of measurement: we generally count what happens. What no longer happens because people are afraid does not keep statistics of its own.

Nobody counts the evenings when someone decided it was safer to stay home. The opinion that went unspoken. The meeting place that was avoided. The symbol someone stopped wearing. The person who decided it was better not to attract attention.

Those people have not disappeared.

They have merely disappeared from our field of vision.

And that is precisely why looking at the table is not enough.

We tend to regard the perspective of whoever keeps the spreadsheet as particularly objective.

A company sees labour costs.

The employee sees her job.

A local council sees the cost of its swimming pool.

A family sees one more reason to enjoy living there.

An administration sees a case.

The person standing in front of the desk sees their problem.

None of these perspectives has to be wrong.

But none of them is the whole picture.

Even our language sometimes reveals which side of the desk we are sitting on.

“Workforce reduction” sounds remarkably civilised.

Whether the person who no longer has a job feels particularly improved by the reduction is worth asking.

“Market correction” sounds pleasantly hygienic too.

For the business that subsequently ceases to exist, the improved cleanliness of the market is likely to offer limited consolation.

And “process optimisation” almost always sounds good –

until someone asks:

Better for whom?

It is remarkably easy to remove people from an event simply by changing the language.

What remains are cost centres, cases, staffing expenditure, capacity, utilisation rates, and service units.

This has the invaluable advantage that nobody looks sad anymore.

The people are still there, of course.

They simply no longer appear in the description.

And if people can disappear from descriptions that reliably, we should occasionally check whether the same thing has happened to any of the other participants.

The carp, for example.

Torsten Sträter once talked about a Christmas carp dinner and, in essence, pointed out that the man and the fish would probably both have preferred to spend Christmas Eve differently.

It is a remarkably precise description of differing perspectives.

The human calls it Christmas dinner.

The carp probably calls it something else.

And a goose, too, is likely to regard the increasing appearance of Christmas decorations by late November as a deeply worrying leading indicator.

It all depends on which side of the plate, the balance sheet, or the food chain you happen to be sitting on.

That does not mean everyone gets to have their own truth.

The antelope was eaten – or it wasn’t.

The job was cut – or it wasn’t.

The swimming pool is open – or it is closed.

Those are facts.

Perspective does not mean that reality becomes arbitrary.

It means that the same reality can mean something entirely different to different people.

For the lion, it was a good lunch.

For the antelope, it wasn’t.

Both describe the same event.

And if the remaining antelopes subsequently avoid areas with particularly large numbers of lions, the number of hunting incidents there may even fall.

Excellent statistics.

Now all we need to do is find out where the antelopes went.

Even when we can measure something with complete objectivity, however, we still have not reached the end of the story.

A saying is attributed to Albert Einstein – which, as we know, often means that Albert Einstein probably never said it – supposedly explaining the relativity of a minute:

Its duration depends on which side of a toilet door you are standing.

Inside:

“I’ll be out in a minute!”

Outside:

“You’ve been in there since the Thirty Years‘ War!”

The clock is impartial.

It measures the same sixty seconds on both sides.

It just cannot tell us how long they are.

The measurement is not wrong.

But it is not everything either.

A number can tell us how long a conversation lasted.

It cannot tell us what that conversation meant to someone.

It can measure how many people use a public swimming pool.

It cannot readily measure whether that swimming pool is one of the reasons a family enjoys living in that town.

It can calculate how much a carer costs.

It cannot calculate what it means to a confused older person when that carer sits beside them for a moment and talks to them.

And a balance sheet can tell us fairly precisely what a human being costs.

It has considerably more difficulty with their value.

We should therefore get into the habit of walking around the table once before explaining what is happening on it.

What does an increase in efficiency mean to the person expected to become more efficient?

What does a cost saving mean to the person whose service has just disappeared?

What does a successful hunt mean to the antelope?

What does an excellent metric mean to the human being who does not appear in it?

That does not mean the other side is automatically right.

It means only this:

We should at least have asked them.

Which brings us back to our lion.

By now, he has eaten his antelope and is lying in the sun.

The business consultant is standing beside him, examining the outcome and continuing to identify room for optimisation.

Utilisation could be increased.

The hunt could be organised more efficiently.

Antelope throughput could be improved.

The metrics look excellent.

Unfortunately, the antelope is no longer available to participate in the evaluation.

Which may, in turn, bias the results somewhat in the lion’s favour.

And at this point, Hessian folk wisdom really deserves the final word.

After all, it has a remarkably straightforward description of input, processing, and output:

“Wer viel isst un trinkt, der pisst un scheißt ned wink.”

For those unfortunate enough not to speak Hessian:

“Those who eat and drink a lot don’t piss and shit a little.”

Economics, epistemology, and digestion in a single sentence.

You simply have to look at the world from more than one side.

It depends on who you ask.

If only someone had asked the antelope.

View all topics