Careful what you measure
The short-term metric mirage.
“The lab I worked in was awful. Absurd hours, unpredictable leader — even though he was a huge deal in the field — blaming, chastising, full-on yelling and belittling. It didn’t matter what you did or how well you did it, it was never good enough. Despite all that, our lab was succeeding, big results, tier one publications. No other labs were even close to our output and quality. How do you explain that?”
I don’t remember how long I stared at that Slack message but it was enough time for me to rethink a surprising amount of life choices.
I had just finished a talk about how to build a thriving laboratory culture. Forty minutes of recounting stories and data, outlining tools and skills for team building, and making what I thought was an indisputable case, backed by evidence, that cultures in which fear and negative pressure are the foundation, get poorer results by far — especially in the long run. Yay for me.
Then this message arrived. Sent by a dear friend and one of my all-time favourite colleagues who had attended the talk. He knew I liked challenges to my thinking, that I love working with and through disconfirming evidence.
This time he’d brought the heat.
Curiosity First
When I’m feeling blank-eyed and half-bright, my move is to start asking questions (I admit, It didn’t used to be. The old move was obstinate ass — a sort of foot-stomping, I’m right, parachuting out of the situation.). Interrogation — go!
I asked him about the people he had worked with: “Gifted, clever graduate students, postdocs, great scientists.” I asked about the driving purpose of the lab: “Leading edge discoveries in cancer.” I queried their metrics for success: “Tier one publications get you grant funding.” Alas, no insights that geared into my arguments.
It’s embarrassing how long (and how many questions) it took me to realize that, despite having a PhD and working in the scientific field of his choosing; and despite being one of the most resilient, powerful, capable people I’ve ever known, my friend was no longer a scientist. In fact he hadn’t been a researcher for years.
With those dots connected, I asked one more question. “Of the people who came up through that lab, how many are still scientists?”
It was his turn to pause. “Holy shit,” he finally said. “I can’t think of any.”
And there it was. The long-term cost of a terrible culture writ large.
Unpacking an Unknown Cost
He told me that some of his former colleagues weren’t just promising researchers, they were actually better scientists than their storied, irascible leader.
What they experienced in that environment told them that’s simply how science is done. So they left.
Instead of equipping and empowering the next generation of innovators in his field, an ill-equipped but lauded leader had chased talent and potential from the room.
All those minds could have gone on to start their own labs, their own avenues of inquiry, made their own breakthroughs. But none of them did. Not one is out there tackling the profound issues of the moment.
There’s a big difference between wanting cancer cured and wanting to be the one who cures it.
If the leader had truly cared about the overarching goal, how and who wouldn’t matter. He would have understood that by inviting more people into the work of tackling an intractable problem, the odds of success go up. He would have done everything in his power to build a culture that incubated good science, and good science leadership.
Where there is only one lab exploring his particular border of knowledge, there could have been 20, 30, 100.
Be careful what you measure
Publications are easy to measure. Engagements, clicks, quarterly revenues, etc. All simple, straight forward. We get them. But they tell only half the story, or sometimes, no story at all.
Take the economy for instance — that engine of quarterly return. Right up until the day before the market crash of 2008, the short-term data was still telling us that those banks were AAA rated. A sure thing.
The short-term metric is a mirage we can’t help chasing. This time there’ll be water. Just over that next ridge.
The cultures we create at work, in the lab, at home, are built on what we value enough to measure. A worship of short-term results creates short-term environments. Chaos, turnover, stress, self-protection thrive in these spaces.
Maybe it’s time to measure something with far more value. Metrics like cultural wellbeing, values-aligned behaviour, climate impacts, levels of innovation, trust, respect, etc. They’re far more difficult to measure but they’re no mirage.
And who knows, paying them the attention they deserve might just cure cancer.
