Imagine this. You go open YouTube. You see two videos on the same topic. One with 5 views, and one with hundreds of thousands of views. Which one do you watch? I often end up thinking:

Oh if it has so many people who watched it, this might be interesting!

Does that little counter below the video truely describe if it's a meaningful thing to watch? No.

Now, imagine being the person making those videos. Seeing that one of your video got lots of views, and others not changes what you create. You start to create what you think people want to watch.

Measuring something and sharing that number changes how we act.

So when we put a number on something in our services, products or organization, it might be smart to think about what will be the ripple effect of showing that tiny number. Will it help people to make better choices? Or will it fuck things.

In the world of social impact, there's a lovely tool called “stories of change and Most significant change technique (1)” Instead of using cold, hard numbers to show progress, they use stories. It shows that often the impact something has can't just be summarized in one number.

Sometimes deciding not to measure something is just the better choice.

Action Question

What metrics are you using right now that might have a negative ripple effect?

Footnotes

(1) To learn more about this technic check this Wikipedia article or this one from Better Evaluation

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Written with AI help: This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.