2025-04-12 Measure vs Assess

Much like with mentoring vs coaching, I see “measure” and “assess” being used interchangeably, but I like to draw a distinction (originally inspired by Roy Rapoport), and I think it’s valuable:

• “Measure” for quantifiable things, where you can put a concrete number to something, usually with a high degree of objectivity - height, weight, price, etc.

• “Assess” for qualitative things, where you simply can’t and it’s highly subjective - how fun was the activity, how well is the team performing, how good was the journey

Often the things you care most about are the things you can only assess, not measure. But you can use measurements as indicators, and ultimately to inform your assessment (see also 2025-04-02 Data Informed, not Data Driven).

You need more than a speedometer log to tell you if a journey was good or not, but if you never went above walking pace for three hours, chances are it wasn’t great. Knowing how often a team ships new things, or how often their changes brea, won’t tell you on their own how well a team is performing, but it’s likely that there’s some correlation.

Incidentally this is part of why I love OKRs (see https://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/lightweight-okrs/ etc.)- they make the distinction explicit. A qualitative Objective for you to assess your achievement of, as indicated by the quantitative Key Results that you’ve designated as critical measurements.

So

As per 2025-04-02 Mentoring vs Coaching, linguistic prescriptivism has its problems, but I think there’s value in drawing a distinction here - are you looking at something you can measure, or something you need to assess?