At the beginning of every year, I am amazed by how many news stories are written about top airline safety rankings and how fast those stories spread.
I was once told by a former boss “what gets measured gets attention,” as he was explaining the need to get improved levels of performance from our work group. You can’t just do the job and expect things in a large organization to get better. Metrics are necessary to help shape what you want out of an organization, whether it’s speed, efficiency or safety. Fast forward a couple of decades, and the same is true today. Yet we have learned over the years that not every metric is useful, and we now know a lot about how to choose metrics that make sense.
Last year, I posted an article on LinkedIn about a reaction to one of these safety ranking stories, and it explained why you can…
