Who’s winning the race between quantity and quality?
The rabbit & tortoise race story is just too mainstream to discuss here. Why not ponder over a virtual race between quantity and quality?
At the outset, quality seems the clear winner. Organizations emphasize on quality to stay in the competition. Innovations cannot be pathbreaking unless they meet a certain standard of quality. Every product launch targets the Minimum Viable Product(MVP) features which alludes to delivering quality over quantity. Every single thing you consider a masterpiece in today’s world is made possible only with delivering quality. No doubt, quality is the bare minimum thing anyone would expect in this world of multiple choices.
Picture this: I intentionally inserted the phrase “multiple choices” in my narrative to subvert your attention from ‘quality’ to ‘quantity’.
My narrative must reflect the reality of today’s world, a world where quantity influences quality of life. Think about the sheer number of options available to you to choose from. Let’s go deeper to understand its impact.
The Multiplicity
How many apps have you installed on your smartphone? How many of them do you use on a regular basis? If you aren’t using many of them, why don’t you simply uninstall them? What made you install those unused apps at the first place?
That’s too many questions to take (pun intended) but I’m sure you have no rationalistic answer to justify the sheer quantity of things you absorb. It won’t be wrong to say quantity is impacting our lives. The question remains is, in what way? Are we getting carried over by overwhelming number of products & services accessible to us which is forcing us to prioritize quantity over quality? Think over.
The Measure
How do organizations measure the quality of products they build?
If running a test produces an output, that output is the measure of quality. Interestingly, the representation of this output is merely a number which is synonymous with quantity, Isn’t it?
A popular British Economist Charles Goodhart coined a law in Economics which states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Let’s see if we can draw a relation with our topic of discussion. When the quantity becomes a target(to measure quality), it ceases to be a good measure. A point worth introspecting the next time you present quality numbers to your leadership.
I started this article mentioning the rabbit & tortoise race story. If I have to conclude this article using that as an analogy, I would say rabbit represents quantity and tortoise represents quality. Our mindset is such that it always attributes speed & agility to rabbit and not the tortoise. That’s why we need to insert a rabbit in the story, without which we can’t appreciate tortoise’s abilities.
