(This is me working out some thoughts for work.)

My company hosts an event each year that we call Practice Week. It is a week set aside for reflection and learning, focused on the strange discipline known as service design. This year our team is dividing into “pods”, each focusing on some area of interest or importance to service design.

My pod’s subject is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Service Design.

According to Wikipedia, “KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

It is indisputable that KPIs are terribly important in business, and this is why we are learning about them, not because any of us are compelled by this subject. We confessed to one another that, for a variety reasons, we were suffering a lack of intrinsic interest. For us KPIs have been a necessary evil — a combination of 1) boring, 2) abstract and 3) morally suspect.

After sharing our reservations about KPIs, it occurred to us that maybe challenging these reservations directly might breathe some inspiration into our session.

We asked:

1. Are KPIs essentially boring, abstract and suspect — or do they just seem this way to us because of how we’ve approached them?
2. Might there be a way to approach them that makes them interesting, tangibly real and a valuable part of our service design practice?

In other words, is there a philosophical opportunity to reconceive KPIs in a way that helps service designers organically integrate KPIs into our praxis?

(Honestly, this reunderstanding of uninteresting and trivial matters as fascinating and worthy problems is a core skill for designers — or at least designers like me. If we choose to rely on work ethic and willpower to slog through work we find boring , we will inevitably produce uninspired, uninspiring designs that are good for little more than setting the stage for implementation. We will become what engineers think we are: a preliminary planning step on the way toward the real work of building. If we endure the boredom, we can certainly bullshit ourselves and others and playact enthusiasm, but our “positivity” performances will be even more boring and unconvincing than our work. We’ll contribute to transforming the world into meaningless, joyless bullshit. As someone with a feeble work ethic and poor acting skills, I’ve never had any choice but to resort to philosophy in order to find genuine interest in problems that initially strike me as irredeemably dull and pointless. I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this out loud, but imprudent candidness is a key spice in my flavorful practice.) …

…So moving toward framing this problem as a design brief, some questions emerge, pertaining to the three repellent characteristics of KPIs.

1. Can we change our understanding of KPIs interesting in a way that reveals KPIs as an interesting aspect of design work — an aspect we are intrinsically motivated to use?
2. Can we ground our understanding of KPIs in realities we intuit directly and concretely, and make an abstract “experience-distant” knowing more “experience-near“?
3. If we are able to intuitively understand KPIs and able to incorporate them into our practices, what possibilities of influence does this open to us? Might KPIs empower us to find more profound and demonstrable win-wins benefitting both an organization’s bottom line and the wider world?

But should they (and measurements in general) be as all-important as they currently are? And how reliable are they? Do KPIs produce unintended consequences, both in outcome and in the experience of work?