I love metrics. I believe deeply in the practice of keeping score. And as a lover of metrics, I was delighted by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s announcement yesterday of a new metric: the Healthy Congress Index (HCI)! (Click here for the USA Today story.) The BPC, a highly respected Washington think tank founded by eminent former legislators from both sides of the political aisle, has constructed (click here for their “Methodology”) the HCI from data related to:
- Working days and days in session for both houses of Congress
- Debate practices in the Senate
- Floor amendment process rules in the House of Representatives
- Bills ordered reported by Senate and House committees, and conference committee activities
At last, we have a quantitative score to measure the productivity of a segment of our society that virtually everyone feels is at the bottom of the productivity heap. Lest you think I’m being sarcastic here, I’m not – I’m very seriously enthusiastic about this initiative. After all, that which is measured tends to improve. There is only one problem with the HCI:
IT’S NOT REALLY AN INDEX!
Right now, the HCI is simply a hard-to-assimilate pile of graphs and numbers. That’s progress, but while an “index” may be constructed from disparate data, in order to be a true index it must be a single and usually numerical score – if you don’t believe me, see definition 6(a) in Merriam-Websteror the Wikipedia entry for “Index.” The data need to be boiled down to a single score enabling us to assess each Congress’s performance and identify trends in Congress’s behavior. That may seem a bit arbitrary, but without that, all the HCI will generate is a lot more heat and very little light. And after all, this “arbitrariness” hasn’t hampered us from embracing the Consumer Confidence Index® published by the Conference Board, or those measures of “quality of life” that boil down to a single numerical ranking of U.S. urban areas.
So to the Bipartisan Policy Center, I say congratulations and great work! You’ve done the heavy lifting of identifying the key data contributing to the Healthy Congress Index; now you need to go the last mile and turn the HCI into a real, trackable score. Let’s hold our legislators’ feet to a real fire!
(If the term “OKR” in this post’s title is new to you, it stands for “objectives and key results,” a term widely used in business to identify the metrics used to assess performance and often to determine compensation as well.)