The over-quantified business

In my last post, I worried that we are in danger of artificializing our own intelligence and I said I would write more about how business, in the name of efficiency and productivity has reduced so much of our lives to sterile measurement, optimization and accountability. This is today’s topic.

St Paul says, famously: the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.

What is this, if not a critique of a culture driven only by accountability? In business today everything becomes the letter; surfaces, performances, measurable KPIs. And the spirit (ambiguity, failure, silence, hesitation) is exorcised like a demon.

Our work is increasingly defined by quantifiable outcomes: efficiency, productivity, key performance indicators. Businesses rely on data to guide decision-making: the ambition is often to be data-driven. And I have played more than my fair part in developing the tools and techniques which make this possible for many businesses around the world.

So is there a problem?

Measurement vs. value

The trouble isn't data, or analysis: it's when data becomes the only thing we trust. We know it's nonsense - we're social animals, not spreadsheets - but the obsession with measurement is not just a cultural quirk or a misguided managerial fad. It often feels like the very structure that our social thinking takes today in a service-based, rather than productive, economy.

This cannot be a neutral trend, because the stakes are so very high. When we reduce the value of work to its measurable outputs, we miss out the freedoms people have to lead the kinds of lives they value.

In This Life, Martin Hägglund argues that our finite time is the most valuable resource we have as human beings. That confronts us with a more basic question than any metric: How do we want to spend our time together?

To be fair, measurement can be a helpful proxy, but when it becomes the aim rather than a tool, it distorts. For example, we can measure the income of a warehouse worker, but not the dignity of their work. Yet dignity is often what gives work its personal worth: what makes the wage worth earning.

I’m not against measuring outcomes, but when this becomes the end goal it distorts the more fundamental question: Why are we doing this in the first place?

A large part of the problem is that we've outsourced our understanding of value to market signals. Economics as a discipline has historically separated itself from other social sciences by treating value as though it were an objective substance, independent of public opinion or moral concern. In other words, there’s a sense that prices, wages, or market forces are governed by supposedly natural laws, beyond the scope of our ethical or democratic engagement.

A worker stands in an endless measured space

If it earns a return, we say it's valuable. If it's efficient, we say it's intelligent. But this ignores social value, moral value, and the capacities that aren't easily priced.

We may be told (indeed we often are) that there’s no alternative to a narrow version of economic reasoning in which we are variables in the face of market forces. If you question the drive for optimization, you’ll be told that you misunderstand how business really works. Some of you may be thinking exactly that about my writing here.

But I have to re-iterate one of my central concerns: that we too often fail to recognize the profound social meaning of value. If we use GDP as our sole gauge of economic health, we exclude the value of care work, volunteer work, or the environment, reducing them to externalities.

But care undermines the idea that individuals are self-sufficient, endlessly rational actors maximizing their self-interest. We are fundamentally interdependent. During times of illness, infancy, or old age, we are all vulnerable.

The most strident politician, the most incisive CEO, the most aggressive prize fighter, the most independent individualist, all will one day likely be frail, frightened and incontinent: grateful for the nurse's poorly rewarded, utterly unmeasurable kindness

If one’s entire worldview is built on the idea of homo economicus, the notion of caring for another person out of love or moral obligation is reduced to a hidden or unmeasured phenomenon. As Beth Orton so beautifully sings: Why must people always grab what they'd never grasp?

To build a society that values human dignity, we would need to integrate care, and the all time, relationships, and emotional energy it requires, into our economic and social frameworks. Care is radical because it insists that you are not just responsible for yourself but also for others, and they for you. This idea can’t be fully integrated into a worldview that measures worth strictly by individual output or market productivity, for to quote St Paul again: The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.”

AI, frankly, makes this worse because it gives us outputs with such confidence and speed that we start deferring to it without asking, what are we missing? I see this deference every day. But AI is a fantasy of capital: the dream of labor without mess, without resistance.

The Value of Ambiguity

One of the claims I raised in my last newsletter was that ambiguity is being erased, not just from our business processes, but from our conception of intelligence. Machines can't tolerate it, so we train ourselves not to.

We may actually find this comforting, because we've always been uneasy with ambiguity. But now we behave as though we're supposed to make life efficient when what we actually need is to make it livable. Ambiguity, contradiction, emotional nuance: these are the raw materials of being human. You don't become wise by optimizing; you become wise by grappling with things you don't fully understand.

Ambiguity is not an error or a flaw: it's the very condition for vision and wisdom.

When we train ourselves to see only what can be optimized or computed, we grow blind to the virtue, the goodness, that arises through attention, (loving attention, I would say) to the particular, to the human, to the not easily grasped.

Why does business, as a practice, cling so hard to this efficiency model? Because it feels safe. Ambiguity is cognitively taxing, even threatening. In fast-moving companies especially, the illusion of control that metrics give you is extremely seductive. Managers don't get rewarded for tolerating ambiguity: they get rewarded for minimizing it.

Efficiency is good for execution, not for insight. And the problem is that we're designing organizations around execution at scale, not learning at depth.

At the innovation lab IDEO, they often said: the best insights come from the edge cases, not the averages. If your dashboard is only surfacing what's typical, you lose that capacity for creative leaps.

Humans are best at reframing problems: seeing them from a new perspective. Machines are good at solving the problem as posed. But many of the world's hardest challenges, and the most difficult business questions, are poorly posed. We need ambiguity to reframe them. If you eliminate ambiguity too early (because it's not efficient) you might be solving the wrong problem, albeit expertly.

I've seen this in design teams too. When you introduce metrics early in the process, such as A/B testing or user analytics, it narrows the creative aperture. People stop exploring ambiguity. But the early phase of design needs ambiguity. That's where empathy, reframing, intuition all happen. The things that can't be measured, yet are most essential.

The human cost

When work becomes a game of optimization, and people become inputs, we erode trust, creativity, and ultimately resilience. Ironically, the very things we need most in times of uncertainty. There's a dangerous myth that intelligence means calculation. But humans are creatures of flesh and feeling. We live through stories, relationships, symbolic thinking.

With the rise of digital platforms we're often designing for the system, not for the human. We create frictionless, efficient interfaces, but those don't always support real human needs.

A more humane model of business or work would begin by asking: what does this work enable people to be and do? Not just what it produces, but how it enhances or limits their lives. Does it expand their freedom? Allow them to participate meaningfully in society? Questions like this get lost in the obsession with efficiency.

In economics, there's a deep tradition (starting with Aristotle and running through Adam Smith) of recognizing that reason is not just calculation. It's about deliberation, imagination, even sympathy. If you strip away ambiguity, you impoverish reason. The challenge is to build systems that can accommodate complexity without collapsing into chaos.

I see economics as a moral and social practice; Adam Smith, after all was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. In this light, I would want to see mutualism (or democracy, if you will) at every level. Even in the workplace, employees could have a direct say in setting the metrics that govern them, or in deciding what aspects of their performance truly matter, giving people a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape their daily reality.

Mutualism as an Alternative

It's fascinating how many CEOs claim to be libertarians, and even use "communism" as a handy insult for any attempt to give workers a say in their work. And yet, it is those same CEOs who manage their companies with an almost tyrannical centralized management, with plans, targets and ideologies as rigid as anything the Politburo dreamed of. I follow Hayek more than they do in believing that centralized authorities (including corporate leadership) fundamentally cannot access or process the "particular knowledge of time and place" that exists only in the minds of individuals throughout society. Enterprise key performance indicators pretend that we can.

Work is not only a contract between employer and employee: it is more broadly embedded in community, power, and culture. Mutualism, whether through co-operatives or European-style worker participation, acknowledges that. But mutualism is messy. It requires trust, patience, ambiguity: qualities that spreadsheets can't handle.

Mutualism also acknowledges that the economy can be designed for reciprocal benefit, not unilateral extraction. But this is not merely a technocratic solution. It's a challenge to the logic of value itself and the outcomes can be surprising.

For example, in some European countries, including Germany and Scandinavia, employees have a substantial say on corporate boards. In these contexts, the definition of “profit” and “success” can be broadened to include maintaining stable employment, fair working hours, and environmental impact, rather than short-term returns for shareholders. In companies with worker representation on the compensation board, CEO pay is proportionately higher.

"... evidence suggests that an increase in labor power leads to higher CEO compensation ... When employee representatives are added to a board, CEO compensation increases by a third, whereas employees can secure their jobs ... a common interest that may motivate them to form an alliance."

This kind of system doesn’t just challenge the efficiency paradigm: it reframes the question of shared purpose. When mutualism is embraced not as a workaround but as a principle, it opens the door to ways of organizing our participation, and dignity. It’s a move from extraction to relationship, from metric to meaning.

Embracing the Unmeasurable

A truly humane economy may begin with what is useless. Love and care that cannot be scaled; the hesitation and ambiguity that defies automation; the conversation that changes no metric but reorients a life. These are not inefficiencies, but quiet revolutions.

We can understand freedom in terms of shared responsibility, as servants of one another (St Paul again, with whom I struggle, but he is my Lenten reading.) Often in liberal economic theory, freedom is conflated with an absence of constraints: “Let the market do its work.” But that seems to me a very impoverished notion of freedom.

If we collectively organize the conditions of our lives, so that we can dedicate time and resources to what matters most to us - like caring for children, the elderly, or ourselves in moments of need - rather than consuming your daily existence in precarious labor or fear of not meeting certain metrics: that's seem more like freedom to me.

You know the joke: a man loses his keys in the dark. He searches under the streetlamp. Someone asks, "Did you drop them here?" He replies, "No, but the light is better here."

This is what optimization culture does: it looks for value only where the light of measurement shines. But the keys (the meaning, the justice, the Good) are elsewhere.

So, be wary of designing better metrics without also designing systems of mutual care and recognizing the preciousness of our lives and finite time. Sometimes the most radical thing is to refuse to measure.

Turn off the lamp. Let us sit, like fools, in the dark. Only there can we begin again.