We love a good indicator:
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Myers Briggs Personality Types (MBTI), global temperature, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Standardized Aptitude Test (SATs) etc etc.
And indeed, these are often very handy. The best indicators capture core elements of something we value (have purpose), help us understand something better (knowledge), offer a snapshot of its status (current situation), often relative to some standard or compared to others, and/or show us how we can intervene to change the outcome or use the information in some way that advances our situation. And some offer promises of all the above.
For example, some people might use the MBTI to better understand their own traits and how they might use these to advance a career. The Fed might look at the CPI to to gauge inflation and decide how to adjust interest rates, scientists might use changes in global temperature to judge whether recent trends in climate are unusual, and schools might use SATs to accept or reject a college application.
But the the most compelling reason we love indicators is that they simplify an otherwise complex situation and allow us to communicate about that situation more easily. Indicators are shorthand. They are useful in that respect. But only if we also remember that because they’re shorthand, most of them therefore reduce complexity in ways that miss important characteristics.
When we used rising global temperature as a shorthand for ‘the climate is changing’, it ended up being called ‘global warming’, and although it captured the public’s attention (it achieved a communication purpose), it missed explaining almost all the ways in which climate change will be problematic. We have been struggling to correct, or at least improve upon that for 30+ years.
When we use MBTI to understand our own personality traits, it can certainly offer some insights, but it reduces some of the measures to ‘either/or’ traits that simply aren’t true opposites of each other, giving us a false sense of certainty about where we fall on a much more nuanced spectrum.
When we measure aptitude based only on SATs, we often equate it with ‘potential’, which misses all the myriad other ways that we could measure potential, including how a student learns and how conscientious that student might be in digging into topics they don’t yet understand as well.
We also have to be conscious of why certain indicators were created so that we can use them in accordance with that purpose and no over-interpret them.
For example, some indicators are ‘leading’ indicators. Doctors monitor your cholesterol as a leading indicator of heart health. The longer you have high cholesterol, the more likely you are to have a heart problem in the future. It is a way of forecasting, and therefore intervening, in the future. It isn’t a one-to-one measure - there may be all sorts of other things that influence your heart - but there is enough connection between cholesterol and heart attacks, that it’s useful, and indicates a course of action.
A ‘lagging’ indicator show us what has already changed. For example, profit is a lagging indicator. You measure your revenue, your expenses, and what you get at the end of the year is (hopefully) profit. It’s a necessary and useful performance indicator, but it if you want to forecast profit, you have to look at leading indicators, like customer satisfaction, or how often your marketing converts into customers, perhaps.
In climate change, global temperature is a lagging indicator. It shows what has already changed. We need to understand what makes it change in order to predict its future trajectory. So, after research determined that greenhouse gases influence temperature, the concentration of global carbon dioxide in the atmosphere became a leading indicator for projecting the next few decades of global temperature. And a step further back from that, human-caused emissions of CO2 therefore become a leading indicator for projecting the amount of carbon dioxide there will be in the air. And then even further back, changes in the number of electric cars being bought can become a leading indicator of how our emissions will change….and so on and so on.
You can easily fall into a rabbit hole of leading indicators. And….often we need to. The ‘simple’ story is not usually enough to uncover the multiple factors that do or can influence meaningful change.
While there are useful benefits to indicators, especially as the beginning of a trail of insight, they usually only mark the first few steps of that insight.
If we want to create a new chapter than we value - whether it’s our own personal career path (or mentoring others’ careers), or better health, or a more equitable economy, or a safer, cleaner planet, we have to be mindful that indicators are just that - a hint. A more complex or nuanced picture almost always lurks beneath, and a commitment to change nearly always benefits from a deeper excavation of the system and the connections.