With all the furore about the change to testing this week and the introduction of the English Bac I came across this Blog post from Marketing Guru Seth Godin:
Netflix tests everything. They're very proud that they A/B test interactions, offerings, pricing, everything. It's almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success
Except they didn't test the model of renting DVDs by mail for a monthly fee.
And they didn't test the model of having an innovative corporate culture.
And they didn't test the idea of betting the company on a switch to online delivery.
The three biggest assets of the company weren't tested, because they couldn't be.
Sure, go ahead and test what's testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.
You can see more of Seth Godin at http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/
Although the examples are corporate the core message is transferable. It alludes once again to the famous quote from Einstein that
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"
For services for people with learning difficulites and disabilities we also find testing and measuring problematic. Sometimes it seems we can get very carried away with accredited outcomes and activity measures,when maybe the bigger question is are we offering a curriculum that is getting learners to where they want to be? We like the auditng model ( and so do funders) because it allows us to benchamark, but is the requirement for auditability a constraint on the development of performance measures and should we be moving more towards outcome based measures which reflect the impact of our intevention?
In these days of budget cuts and austerity it might be more important than ever to look at way how we measure outcomes and not sumply activity - of course they are sometimes a bit qualitative, idiosyncratic or even bespoke so much harder to count!!
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