Measurement and Importance

A recent campaign by Aircel attempts to raise awareness about the dwindling tiger population in India. Apparently there are only 1411 of them, but the campaign only asks people to spread awareness about this info - how it will translate into action, and more importantly what action, is anybody's guess. So here I am, doing my bit. But I am incredibly uninformed about the magnitude of the Tiger situation. Is 1411 a small number? I dont know the life expectancy or mortality rates in tigers, but assuming 10 tigers die every year, we are still good for 140 years without counting new additions. In comparison, global warming looks a near term issue.

Another hot topic is how to deal with drunk drivers. The recent high-profile incident in South Mumbai has everyone clamoring for harsher penalties and stricter punishment. To be clear, drunk driving is extremely dangerous and must be punished. But is it the most dangerous form of driving out there? Again, I dont know the stats, but I doubt that drunk driving causes the highest number of accidents or deaths. I'd say its overspeeding and breaking of traffic rules.

One of our psychological biases is to automatically attach importance to what can be measured because we are more comfortable with tangibles than abstracts. Nowhere is this more visible than in our financial markets where all sorts of ratios and indicators are used to explain trends. Once a metric has been devised, of course, a proper explanation inevitably follows, and this is called post rationalization which we are extremely good at.

Drunk driving must be dealt with but what about other offences that are equally fatal? There is no tangible metric to measure these offences nor a system to track such offenders. With drunk driving though, the cops simply have to hang out in the vicinity of night clubs with a breathalyzer and they are sure to find offenders, which will make for good reporting and fat wallets. To say there are only 1411 tigers sounds much more desperate than simply asking people to stop poaching tigers. This bias is also prevalent in the corporate world where sales, billing, collections, margins etc are emphasized to death. It is widely assumed, and incorrectly so, that numbers dont lie. Intangibles like employee morale and customer satisfaction are hardly ever focused on. And here's the worst part. Even when cos choose to look at these intangibles, the attempt is always to create a survey and get a number which simply defeats the purpose. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what it means to have customers who are 88.5% satisfied.