Employees must be required to quantify Goals wherever possible.
You will always have to follow up and insist. Much more can be quantified than most people think. After all, they have never learned it systematically, with the exception of those with exquisite scientific or technical training.
Most give up too quickly, they don't think through the possibilities enough, and they don't use their imagination; indeed, many believe that Creativity and Quantification are in natural collision.
The opposite is the case: a successful quantification of something that was previously unquantifiable is the prime example of a highly creative achievement. The absolute minimum is quantification in the Time dimension, i.e., there must be no goal without a deadline.
Fredmund Malik deliberately speaks of quantification and not just Measurement. The English cyberneticist Stafford Beer put it aptly: "There is more to quantification than numeration. One can go as far as possible with quantification, at least beyond the point where one usually stops, but – and this is an important but – one must not make a dogma out of it.
The dogma to which one is in danger of succumbing is: "What cannot be quantified is not important – and therefore does not require attention." That would be extraordinarily dangerous – for every company and every other other organization. It is the error that results from misunderstood quantification – the consequence of a completely misunderstood supposed scientificity, known in epistemology as "scientism".
Every Experience shows: The more important a goal is for a company, the less quantifiable it is in the strict sense of the word. Sales, market shares, productivity, cash flow and much more can be quantified today (this was not always thought possible). But what about quality, customer benefit, customer satisfaction, innovative strength, etc.? The fact that non-quantifiable things are even more important than the quantifiable ones applies, by the way, to a much greater extent to non-economic organizations.
So it's a kind of tightrope walk: as much quantification as possible, but not so stubborn that it takes your eye off the other things that are just as important but not quantifiable. There is no general formula that can help one find the right measure. In individual cases, however, i.e. when the circumstances, situation, product, market, technology and, above all, the people are known, it is often possible to say quite accurately how far one can and must go with quantification.
In any case, one must demand the greatest possible precision. This is still possible even if quantification in the narrower sense is no longer possible. How do we want to be able to determine and judge at the end of the next period whether we have come closer to the goal or not? – that must be the key question. Therefore, people must be educated to describe the desired end states as precisely as possible. As a little trick, you can require the perfect tense in the linguistic formulation: Not what do we want to achieve, but what should be achieved? The masters of linguistic precision are the good lawyers, even if they occasionally use their art to create confusion.
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MALIK, Fredmund, 2002. Führen, Leisten, Leben: wirksames Management für eine neue Zeit. 14. Aufl. Stuttgart München: Dt. Verl.-Anst. ISBN 978-3-421-05370-1, p. 181–182.