There’s an apocryphal parable about chickens, which is told in some variation by engineers, statisticians, astute operators, wise marketers and every so often truly remarkable politicians. My variation goes as follows:
The management of a certain poultry farm which happens to be the major employer in the area find themselves under pressure from the community and their investors to increase egg output.
Being savvy types and recognizing that there are multiple stakeholders involved, they promptly apply for a government grant and ask their backers for funding to study the egg laying patterns of their chickens. As all parties value expertise, management seeks out individuals with impressive chicken-related credentials and sets them loose on the farm to investigate. In parallel, the farm’s marketing team loudly and proudly explains to everyone who will listen, how they have retained the foremost authority who is conducting an exhaustive study to determine what to do.
Several weeks pass and the expert completes their study. A slide deck, whitepaper, archives of notes, graphs and photographs are delivered. All point to the same conclusion, the quantity of eggs produced daily can be improved if the chickens are “massaged” beak-to-tail with both hands at regular intervals several times a day. This will encourage the eggs to move through and ultimately out of the chicken’s system. The team concludes, that not only will they produce more eggs, but the chickens will also become happier, friendlier and more attractive.
Management rejoices! Marketing trumpets! Several skilled masseuses are hired to service the chickens daily. The problem is solved and everyone pats themselves on the back.
But no one had actually been measuring egg output before the study and no one was tasked with measuring it after. So no one actually knows if egg output has been improved let alone if the chicken’s happiness index has actually increased. It’s quite likely in fact that they just committed a large amount of time and money harassing chickens.
No one cares about the chickens or they’re egg output anymore. The people are focused on the fact they can unequivocally state that they HAVE DONE SOMETHING about the problem.
It ends there. Engineers and the statisticians weep. It’s quite likely that the poultry farm just committed a large amount of time and money to ritualistically harassing their chickens.
Without a well-designed, instrumented and executed plan for measuring results, no one will really ever know. And this is a pattern seen across all fields — progress for the sake of signalling progress without any measurable goals or definitions of success. Engineers and the statisticians weep. Meanwhile, behavioral psychologists ponder if the goal was actually to bring the community together and re-energize the conversation, in which case they chicken squeezers may actually have succeeded?
Success or failure is about how you measure it. The parable of squeezing the chickens reminds us to hold ourselves and our teams accountable — make sure we can measure what we are trying to improve and set real metrics for measuring improvement before making changes. Then be self-critical about if you can prove a causal link between the action and metrics movement. Lastly, look for unintended consequences. Make sure you didn’t just create a farm full of harassed and haggard chickens.
Thank you for reading my thoughts. – Jay
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