Measuring the Immeasurable

Before satellites, before radio, a sailor measured the open sea with a rope and a fistful of nerve.

The instrument was called a chip log: a wedge of wood on a long line, knotted at even intervals, coiled and ready in a sailor’s hands. You threw the wood over the stern, let the line run free, and counted the knots slipping through your fingers against the sand draining in a small glass. Count the knots, know your speed. It is why, three centuries on, we still measure a ship in knots.

Now hold that image. A man on a pitching deck, in the dark, no land in any direction, holding a wet rope — and working out precisely where he is.

He was measuring the immeasurable.

We have decided, somewhere along the way, that innovation belongs to a different category of thing. Too creative to count. Too uncertain to forecast. Too alive to sit still for a measurement. I have heard this in boardrooms from Montréal to Riyadh, usually from the most senior person present, usually with a small proud smile — as though the refusal to measure were a mark of sophistication rather than a failure of nerve. The strategy gets presented. The room nods along. Then the Chief Financial Officer asks the one question that turns applause into silence: what is the return? And the innovation leader, who a moment ago spoke so fluently about ecosystems and the future, discovers there is no rope in their hands.

This is the quiet scandal of the discipline. We have spent thirty years professionalizing innovation — hiring for it, building labs, writing manifestos — and we still cannot answer the CFO. We treat the question as philistine. It is not. It is the most serious question in the room, because it is the navigator’s question. It asks: do you actually know where you are, or are you drifting and calling it exploration?

The reflex is to answer with more dashboards. That is the wrong instrument. Most innovation measurement fails precisely because it imitates the accountant rather than the navigator: it counts inputs — ideas submitted, workshops run, patents filed — and mistakes motion for progress. Stafford Beer, who founded the field of management cybernetics, warned about this half a century ago. A system that measures the wrong variables does not become better managed; it becomes confidently lost. A number that does not change your next decision is not a measurement. It is decoration.

Consider the most creative object we have ever found: a living cell. It does not, for one instant, stop measuring. Maturana and Varela described life itself as a process of continuous self-production, a boundary sensing its world and adjusting to stay alive. Nothing in nature is more inventive than biology, and nothing measures more relentlessly. The idea that creativity and measurement are opposites is not a law of the universe. It is a story we tell to excuse ourselves from the harder work of building the instruments.

What innovation needs, then, is not the ledger but the sextant — a way to read position and speed in open water, where the landmarks have not been invented yet. That is the argument I have spent a career testing across more than twenty countries, and it is the argument of the book I am publishing this summer. Its heart is a single idea, and I have given it a name: ROI².

The first ROI is the one your CFO already knows — return on investment. The second is the one the discipline has been too romantic to claim: return on innovation. Not the theatre of the innovation lab, not the vanity metrics, but the measurable second-order value that innovation throws off even when a given project fails — the capability built, the option created, the intelligence gathered about a future that has not yet arrived. ROI² is what you get when you stop asking innovation to justify itself in the accountant’s language alone, and start measuring it as what it actually is: a portfolio of navigational bets, each with a position, a speed, and a cost of being wrong.

Take a case I have watched play out more than once. A team spends a year on a product that never ships. By the accountant’s single ledger, that is a loss to be written off and quietly forgotten. Read it with the second instrument and the picture inverts: the “failed” year produced a validated supplier network, a regulatory map no competitor holds, and a team that now moves twice as fast on the next attempt. The first ROI was negative. The second was the most valuable thing the division built all year — and because no one measured it, no one defended it, and it was nearly cut. The romantic refusal to count is not a protection of innovation’s mystery. It is what gets innovation killed.

The instruments to do this seriously already exist. ISO 56000, the international family of standards for innovation management, hands us a shared vocabulary and a set of gauges most organizations have never troubled to pick up. It is not a straitjacket. It is a sextant. Used with judgment, it lets an innovation leader walk into the CFO’s office and answer the question — not with a shrug about the unquantifiable, but with a number, a confidence interval, and a reason. In a place like the Gulf, where entire economies are being re-navigated in a single decade against explicit national targets, the leaders who can read their instruments are already pulling away from the ones still insisting the sea cannot be charted.

So here is the Monday-morning move, and it is small enough to do this week. Take one innovation initiative — just one, the one you would most struggle to defend if the CFO asked tomorrow. Do not build a dashboard. Do not commission a framework. Simply attach two numbers to it: what it returns if it works, and what capability, option, or intelligence it builds even if it does not. Write them down. Put a date on when you will check them. You have just thrown your first chip log over the side.

The sailor on the dark deck was never certain of the sea. He was certain of his instruments, and that was enough to cross an ocean. Innovation was never the exception to measurement. We simply mistook our discomfort with the numbers for the impossibility of finding them.

Pick up the rope.

The Innovator’s Compass — Make Innovation Measurable with ROI² — is out now on Kindle, paperback and hardcover. If you have ever had to defend an innovation budget with your instinct instead of your instruments, I wrote it for you. Get the book →

How Innovation-Ready Is Your Organization?

Take the free Innovation Maturity Diagnostic — twelve questions across six pillars, built on thirty years of field research. Five minutes, and a personalised report at the end.

Take the Diagnostic →