Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a voracious reader. I read just about every type of genre but in general I dislike business/management and self-help books, both of which seem to try to pass off some overly-simplistic mantra as the key to improving your work or your life. Despite this aversion, today I began reading Jim Collins’s (2005) Good to Great and the Social Sectors and quickly found a statement that I could latch on to:
“It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that your rigorously assemble evidence–quantitative or qualitative–to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing the data.” (p. 7)
I find myself talk about outcomes higher education outcomes all of the time and once people (very smart people) decide that a particular output defies easy measurement, they frequently decide that 1) it’s not a good outcome or 2) measuring outcomes is stupid. Collins’s point above is right on the mark and one that I work hard to convey.