A tale for our times

Once upon a time there was a man named Paul. He ran a company that hired out vehicles with drivers for a whole variety of different tasks. On the whole the outfit worked well with all the drivers working very hard at their assignments, which were many and varied. But Paul, who had never driven a vehicle, began to feel as if he was being cheated by the drivers and started to think of ways to monitor them. The drivers, who were an honest bunch, were unaware of this and in any case often met up to see how they could do better as they liked their work and were seen by most outsiders as being good at it.

However Paul's suspicions grew and grew until finally he decided to perform checks on the performance of his staff. Sadly, not understanding the work they did, he was unsure what to measure or how to interpret what he did measure or even whether the methods he used to measure things were at all valid. Undeterred however, he set up a complex system that he hoped would calculate the number of miles each driver with his vehicle had driven each month. He argued that as all the vehicles would have to fill up with petrol frequently, monitoring this would be useful and so he managed to put some very expensive sensors in place in the surrounding petrol stations. These would then send him data every time one of his vehicles filled up. He realised that the amount of petrol used depended on a number of variables including the engine size, the type of journey, the condition of the vehicle and the way it was driven so he calculated complicated formulae to factor this in. From these equations he derived his estimates as to how far each vehicle had gone in the last month.

He was shocked. There was a huge variation. Some drivers seemed to be working far harder than others; some appeared to be doing next to nothing and must surely be losing him money. Still he did not ask the drivers as to why this might be but went to lots of meetings with other managers in the company and between them they made even more complex formulae to interpret the data by aportioning it in different ways. Finally though, they decided to meet with the drivers to explain the system to them.

"But Paul!" they said. "If you wanted to know how far we drive why didn't you just look at the milometer instead of setting up this complex arrangement? We do it ourselves every month anyway so we could have just given you the data."
Paul looked a little embarrassed but said nothing.
"Sometimes," they continued "we fill up in far away petrol stations that don't have your monitoring systems so you aren't even capturing all the data."

But Paul wasn't listening.

"And Paul," they said. "Not all our vehicles are the same. Many of them do other tasks as well as simply going from A to B. Just measuring the distance they have driven won't tell you much about what we do."

But Paul wasn't listening.

"Look at Vehicle number Seven," he said, pointing at the spreadsheet. "Last month it only drove three miles, whereas Vehicle Number Two managed over two thousand kilometers."

Ignoring the disparity in units the drivers replied: "But Paul! Vehicle Number Seven is a bulldozer. It can't go very far and in any case its main task is to flatten out the route between the depot and the main road every day. That track is in such bad repair that if the bulldozer didn't flatten it out every day none of the other vehicles could even leave base, never mind do all their work."

But Paul wasn't listening.

"And Vehicle Number Two is a removal van. Of course it clocks up long distances. What you should be measuring is how successful it is at transporting furniture and how much it breaks, or how happy the customers are with the service."

But Paul wasn't listening.

He was dreaming of rolling out his system to all the other branches of the company. He would call it Paul's Longitudinal Investigative Car Survey. Or PLICS for short.

It made no sense but might make his name in the management world.

And the drivers wondered how much all this had cost and whether that money could have been better spent on improving their vehicles or the road, and they wept to see such ineptness all around them but carried on doing what they did very well anyway, much as they had done before.