Look, I’ve seen a lot of outfits come and go in my time. More than twenty years watching the wheels turn, seeing what makes a business click, and what makes it grind to a halt. There’s a buzz going around these days, one of those new fangled terms, about the “crew disquantified org.” Sounds like something straight outta a consultant’s PowerPoint, doesn’t it? But you know what? There’s some real truth to it. Some sharp edges, too.
What is a crew disquantified org anyway? I’ve had folks ask me. My take? It’s when a company gets so hung up on the numbers, the dashboards, the data points that they forget the actual flesh and blood people doing the work. The folks who show up every day, who make things happen. Their real value, the grit, the intuition, the stuff you can’t stick on a spreadsheet, it just gets overlooked. Or worse, it gets dismissed. We’re talking about situations where the measurable stuff, the easy stuff to count, pushes out the genuinely important, harder-to-pin-down stuff. You get a whole crew feeling like they’re just cogs, and not even well-oiled ones at that.
It’s a problem, this. A big one, if you ask me. I remember this little paper in the valleys, back in Wales, struggling because the new owner, bless his heart, he thought every story could be assigned a “reader engagement score” before it was even written. The reporters, they knew the town, they knew what got people talking. But he wanted to plug it all into some algorithm. That’s a small example, sure, but it shows you the drift.
The Chasing of Pixels, Losing the People
You see it a lot in the tech sector, don’t you? Everyone talks about “agile workflows” and “sprint velocity.” Fine, I get it. You need to know if stuff’s getting done. But I’ve watched teams at places like Google (Alphabet Inc.) and Microsoft, brilliant people, who start to feel like their entire worth is tied to how many lines of code they push, or how many tickets they close. Not the elegance of the solution, mind. Not the collaborative spirit. Just the raw, countable output. It’s like we’re all trying to catch butterflies with a hammer. You get something, alright, but it ain’t a butterfly anymore.
I recall a conversation with an old mate, a coder down in California, out near Sunnyvale. Said his boss, bless his cotton socks, was obsessed with “productivity metrics.” My mate, he’d spent a week wrestling with a bug, a real nasty one, that was crashing systems for thousands of users. Fixed it. Saved the company a fortune in downtime and reputation. But his “metrics” for that week looked like he’d been sitting on his backside, because he hadn’t pushed a lot of new code. He was disquantified in their system. The system didn’t measure the crisis averted, only the new widgets made. That’s a crew disquantified org in a nutshell.
Where the Numbers Lie, and Humans Cry
Consulting firms, they are another prime suspect. These giants, think of a Accenture or a Deloitte. They bill by the hour, right? Or by project milestones. So, everyone is tracking their time, justifying every minute. And that’s necessary, I suppose. But what about the late-night epiphany that solved a client’s biggest headache in five minutes? What about the years of experience that let you spot a flaw in a business model before anyone else? That stuff is gold. Pure gold. But how do you put that on a timesheet? You don’t. You try, and it sounds like you’re making excuses. It gets lost. The human element, the experience, the gut feeling, it just becomes background noise.
You ever try to quantify empathy? Or trust? Good luck. Yet these are the very things that build long-term client relationships. A good consultant isn’t just about deliverables; it’s about being a trusted advisor. That trust, it comes from human interaction, from knowing your stuff inside out, from being able to read between the lines. It’s not something you put in a bar chart. A lot of these companies, they’ll tell you they value “soft skills,” but when it comes to performance reviews, they’re looking at billable hours and project completion rates. It’s a contradiction, isn’t it? You say one thing, measure another.
The Grind in the Gig Economy
Think about the gig economy, too. People driving for apps, delivering food, working for these platforms. Take a Uber or a Deliveroo. Everything is about efficiency, speed, ratings. You’re a number, a dot on a map. Your personal circumstances, the flat tire, the sick kid, the stress of navigating a busy city? Irrelevant to the algorithm. It just sees you as ‘available’ or ‘not available,’ and how many jobs you’ve completed in an hour.
Is a good rating from a passenger truly capturing the safe, smooth ride, the pleasant conversation, or just that they got from A to B without fuss? Sometimes, it’s just about being quick. My cousin up in Newcastle, he drove for one of them delivery outfits for a bit. Said he felt like a robot, just following directions on a screen, racing against the clock for a bonus that felt like peanuts. He gave up on it. Said he missed talking to people, figuring out the best route himself, using his own brain. He was a crew disquantified org of one.
What happens if you’re sick and can’t work? Do you get paid? Not unless you’re clocked in, usually. Do they count the stress, the wear and tear on your vehicle, the mental load? Course not. They count trips, accepted rates, cancellations. Simple. Easy to count. Doesn’t tell the whole story, though, does it?
Creative Souls and the Spreadsheets
Advertising and marketing, my old stomping ground. You’ve got these massive groups, like WPP plc or Publicis Groupe, with agencies under their umbrella. They’re all about campaigns, reach, impressions, click-through rates. And yeah, you need that data. You absolutely do. But the germ of an idea, the spark, the gut feeling that a particular slogan is going to resonate with people? That comes from a human brain. It comes from intuition built over years, from understanding people.
You try to put a price on that “aha!” moment. You can’t. They try to measure it with focus groups and surveys, but that’s like trying to weigh smoke. The creative director, the copywriter, the designer, they often feel their worth is being boiled down to whether their ad campaign got ‘X’ clicks, not whether it genuinely changed how people felt about a brand. The “disquantified” part is the artistry, the raw talent, the pure inspiration that can’t be put into a Gantt chart. It’s what separates the truly memorable from the forgettable.
I had a chat with a bloke once, worked in Sydney, for one of the big ad agencies. He said they had a new system for evaluating creative output. He rolled his eyes so hard I thought they might get stuck. “Mate,” he says to me, “they want to measure ‘ideation units’ and ‘concept iteration cycles.’ I just want to make cool stuff that people actually like. Not ‘iterate’ on ‘units’.” Sounds bonkers, right? But it’s where we’re heading.
Care and Counting in Healthcare
Even healthcare, where the human touch is paramount. Consider a system like Kaiser Permanente or HCA Healthcare. They’re looking at patient outcomes, readmission rates, cost efficiency. All valid, important stuff. But what about the nurse who spends an extra five minutes listening to a worried family? The doctor who takes the time to explain a complex diagnosis in simple terms? The empathy, the comfort, the true care that makes a difference in healing, that reduces anxiety?
How do you measure that? You can’t put a number on compassion. Yet, it’s what often separates a good experience from a truly terrible one. When the focus shifts entirely to quantifiable metrics, to “patient throughput” or “cost per procedure,” the unquantifiable human elements, the ones that build trust and provide genuine comfort, they get pushed to the side. What’s the impact of a cheerful nurse versus a burnt-out one on a patient’s recovery? Hard to measure, but you know it matters. My sister-in-law, she’s a nurse, lives down in Norfolk. She’s seen it. “They want us efficient,” she told me, “but efficient don’t mean compassionate.”
The Bottom Line, and What Gets Lost
So, what’s to be done about this crew disquantified org mess? Is it about throwing out all the metrics? Nah, don’t be daft. You can’t run a business on good vibes alone, I know that. But it’s about balance. It’s about remembering that the numbers are a tool, not the whole darn picture. It’s about valuing the people for all their contributions, not just the ones that are easy to plug into a spreadsheet.
We need leaders who understand that some of the most valuable contributions are often the hardest to measure. The person who quietly mentors new staff, preventing burnout. The one who spots a problem three steps down the line because they’ve got years of experience in their bones. The team member who keeps morale up when everything else is going to hell in a handbasket. These are the things that make an organization strong, resilient. Not just the click-through rates or the ‘synergy’ reports.
Leadership that Sees Beyond the Dashboard
It boils down to leadership, plain and simple. Do your bosses really see you? Do they understand what you bring to the table, beyond the numbers? You could be working for a global logistics giant like Maersk, optimizing supply chains down to the last second, but if the human element, the on-the-ground knowledge of the crew, is ignored because it doesn’t fit a tidy metric, you’re missing something vital.
What if your most experienced ship captain makes a call that saves a fortune, based on a gut feeling about the weather? How does that get ‘quantified’ in a performance review that focuses on fuel efficiency for the quarter? It just gets swallowed up. Or worse, attributed to “good luck.”
A lot of companies, they’re so busy trying to automate everything, trying to put everything into a little box, they forget that humans are messy. And that messiness, that intuition, that ability to adapt outside the script, that’s where the real value often lies. The crew disquantified org will eventually find itself with a disengaged, unmotivated crew. And no amount of data can fix that.
What’s needed? Maybe it’s leadership that gets out of the office once in a while. Gets down on the shop floor. Talks to people. Listens to what’s not being said. Asks questions that aren’t on the standard HR template. That’s how you start to quantify the unquantifiable. You don’t do it with a calculator, you do it with your eyes and ears and a bit of common sense.
You want immediate insights? Here’s one: if your people feel like numbers, they’ll act like numbers. They’ll do the bare minimum to hit those numbers, and nothing more. The true passion, the extra mile, it just withers away. And that, my friend, is a recipe for disaster, no matter how good your spreadsheets look. The truth is often messy. It usually is. And you won’t find it all in a data set. Not really.
