I once worked with a race engineer who raced, coached, and mechanic’d on the European F2 circuit. Her most often applied skills as dealing with the personalities of the many different drivers from different countries, all of whom drove differently. One or two of them might have had an ego.

Even on identical cars on the same course, drivers will brake, steer, throttle, corner, lap, and overtake differently. This has an effect on tire wear, which affects speed as the laps progress, and the need to make tire changes. As the race engineer, she had to decide tire angle, suspension stiffness, downforce, and tire pressure that allowed each driver to maximize speed and minimize pit stops. The more you traded tires for speed, the slower you’d be going on the 30th lap, and if you stopped for fresh tires, the other driver could lap you.

That’s a lot of compounding variables to have to keep track of, which I suppose is what makes racing interesting.

This is what computer scientists and mathematicians call an “P-NP” problem. It’s easy to verify the results: did the driver win, or at least drive faster? But it’s not easy to find the solution, or even know if a solution exists. There’s a million dollar prize for whoever solves it.

https://www.claymath.org/millennium/p-vs-np/

Measurement, metrics, and quantification are important. If you don’t understand how your systems, processes, and execution comes together to make it happen, you’re going to be sad. Defining success by one number and then whipping the team to meet that goal / number / metric / KPI, without understanding how to get there, is not leadership. It’s abuse.

Let’s say your business decides it wants to improve customer satisfaction. And let’s say they start by commissioning a survey so you know where you’re at. Solid first move. You now have a number.

‘Leadership’ is talking about the number, what the number is, what the number was last week, why the number isn’t going up. They seem to believe by exhorting their team, publishing the number, making the number a priority, is somehow going to change the number. The number is just the result. Now the real work begins.

Now you figure out how to give the people who deliver the service the tools, training, and equipment they need to deliver better service. Dive into the non-number responses to the survey. Talk to the people at the front lines who might have a helpful perspective, given all the institutional knowledge they carry. Try to understand and actually see, not imagine, what it takes to deliver your product or service. Understand what goes into success, remove obstacles to said success, or at least stop doing the things that slow you down, er, dissatisfy customers.

The number is just a result. It’s just one lap time. It’s not the work needed to get that result.