Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 4. Measures and Decision Making

What you choose to measure has an impact on both the timeliness of decisions and, as a consequence, how weak a signal you can detect. The weaker the signal you get, the more value you can deliver to customers. Digital transformation in part is about capturing weak but important signals so that you can make more time-critical decisions in the moment.

The thin-slice approach gives you the opportunity to test and learn in an end-to-end environment. As early as possible, you need to rely on some kind of signals to know whether you are moving closer to the outcome or further away from it. Measuring the correct signal will allow you to make better decisions earlier to maximize the value you deliver to your customers.

Of course, the challenge is not the lack of signals, but often the opposite: there are too many signals and the system is fairly noisy. The challenge lies in capturing those signals aligned with measuring customer value. The strong, easy-to-measure signals are not always the appropriate ones to measure; in fact, the strength of the signal has almost no correlation to the relevance of the signal for progressing the outcome.

In the early days of Taylorism, the Industrial Age was optimizing for labor productivity and economic efficiency based on logic, rationalism, and empiricism that could be assessed with standardized “certainty” of process and tasks. In the Digital Age that certainty and standardized practice has diminished, yet we ...