Understanding our reason for doing things is important, but challenging. Defining the problem we are trying to solve is the ‘trickiest P‘ by far. One of the reasons for this is the words we use. “Improve.” “Better.” “Impact.” “Effective.” “Efficient.” All lovely words, but all with a vast set of definitions and mostly dependent on your perspective.
Take blog writing for example. Each blog I write is given a readability, SEO, and Social score. Shorter sentences. Transition words. Simple words. Subheadings. Use key words, but not too often. Links to external sites. Links to other posts I’ve written. Images are good, but they need to be labelled in a way google can read. Oh, and something called a Flesch score.
To improve, have more impact, be more effective, I should be more ‘readable’. But readable defined in that way. The weird thing is that I could write a blog that scores high on readability, SEO, and Social, but be meaningless to any human reading it. The topic and content don’t matter.
Before we laugh too loud about this, it’s good recognise we often do this when we ‘go digital’ in our work. We may not have Flesch reading scores or care too much about our SEO score. But how often do we care more about the technology or something other than the people we seek to serve? Or more importantly how often do we have different definitions of impact?
And when we do focus on all the different definitions of impact we have, does it result in something useful?
So what metric are you using? And are they helping you achieve your goal?
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