“What gets measured gets managed,” goes the saying.

But often, it doesn’t end there.

It also gets prioritized, optimized for, and sometimes even chased blindly.

For better or worse, what you choose to measure dictates your focus, your choices, and your actions.

This can lead to unintended side effects.

When shareholder value is the only metric that gets tracked, is it any surprise that people, communities, and the environment are negatively impacted?

Likely, that negative impact goes entirely unnoticed by the company that isn’t measuring those metrics.

It’s no wonder we often default to measuring the metrics we do.

Revenue, page views, downloads, followers, and likes all have nice, round easily trackable numbers attached to them, by which we can measure our performance against others or ourselves.

In fact, the fact that these metrics are prominently displayed in the tools we use suggests to us that we should be tracking them.

That these are the numbers by which we should be judging our success or failure as creators, business owners, and humans.

In reality, we can choose to measure our success and failure by any number of variables.

And the variables we choose to measure will dictate the experience of our work, for everyone who engages with it.

The good news is that we can choose to change what we’re measuring at any time.

And when we do this, our measurements act as a trim tab that will bring the ship around and point us in the direction we wish to be moving.

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