In mission-driven organizations, we tend to feel a particular irritation when those to whom we answer require us to account for our work with statistics. “Not everything that matters can be quantified!,” we insist – and we’re right. In fact, there’s a powerful argument to be made that the more important an endeavor is, the less likely it is that the endeavor’s success or failure will be easily quantifiable.

I’ll go further, in fact, and say that some of the most important aspects of our work are not only impossible to quantify, but also nearly impossible to assess qualitatively, at least with any degree of reliability. How can you know the real-world impact of a correctly applied metadata tag? How can you know whether the research assistance you provided to a student made any difference to her educational experience or her life? When you declined to purchase one book and decided instead to purchase another one, what exactly did the rightness or wrongness of that decision end up meaning for the people your library serves? Any one of these decisions could turn out to be pivotal in the course of an individual’s life and the institution’s ability to achieve its goals – and any one of them could have little or no real-world impact. Except in very rare cases, we’ll never know which was the case for most of the work we do. 

In light of this reality, it would be all too easy to make one of two common mistakes:

1. Throw up our hands and decide that since we can’t reliably measure all the impacts of our work, we should just give up on worrying about those impacts, or
2. Decline to do anything the success of which can’t be measured quantitatively and reliably.

I wish I could offer a magic technique for actually assessing the impact of most of what we do; if I could do that, I’d probably be in a much more lucrative profession. Here’s what I can offer, though: a question that we should always ask ourselves when undertaking a new project, forming a new committee, or defining a proposal:

How will we know whether we’ve succeeded?

The question won’t always be phrased exactly that way, but this is the general mindset that you should always have as you consider undertaking a new initiative. 

Let’s say someone in your library wants to redesign a public space. Great – as a leader, I hope you encourage creative thinking of that kind. But before going very far down the road, ask that person to consider this question: How will I know whether the redesign was a success?

Or suppose one of your managers wants to put together a task force to improve diversity and inclusion in your collections. Great – diversity and inclusion are important. Before undertaking that significant project, though, ask your manager this question: How will we know when the task force’s work is done?

Or suppose your HR director wants to establish a program to improve library morale. Great – staff morale is incredibly important. But right from the outset, the HR director will need to be able to answer this question: How will we know whether morale has improved? 

There’s a fundamental principle at work here: if you’re considering investing time, energy, and/or money in trying to achieve a goal that is intrinsically difficult to measure, ask yourself ahead of time how you will know whether the initiative was a success. If you can’t answer that question compellingly, take a step back. The danger in moving forward without a compelling answer to that question is that you will begin sinking limited resources into something that may or may not be working, and will have no way of knowing whether you’re making progress. Sometimes we do things just because they seem like things we ought to do, rather than because we have good reason to expect them to bear meaningful fruit.

Of course, not being able to answer that question fully and rigorously should not necessarily prevent you from moving forward with the project. In some cases, you’ll decide to go ahead because the likelihood of net benefit is great enough to make it worth the risk. But the exercise of asking and trying to answer that question will always make your initiative more productive and more focused.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You don’t have to measure everything quantitatively, but before undertaking an initiative, you should have at least a reasonable idea of how you’ll know whether it did or didn’t succeed.
• Just because something can’t be measured doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. But if you can’t figure out how to measure it, ask yourself how you know it’s important.
• Sit down with your management or leadership team and review all current projects and task forces. In each case, ask yourselves How will we know when this project is finished or this task force’s work is done? If you can’t answer that question clearly and compellingly, think carefully about whether the project or task force should continue.