In her last post, Karin pointed out that financial measures taken on their own are not a proxy for reputation measurement. I liked Karin’s example on sales of $1 bills for $0.99; sales numbers will be through the roof, but your reputation amongst investors and creditors will likely suffer, while customers won’t know what to think. Karin’s point can be extended beyond financials to other measurements, like approval rating scores for example.

I was recently in a discussion with a client where they brought up this very point. Imagine looking at a plot of George Bush’s approval rating over time without having any notion of history. You would see that people’s approval jumped 35 points up early on, then bounced up and down from there, trending down. You would intuit events, and you would see the trend – but you would not understand anything.

Understanding measurements requires context. On the day that Wells Fargo recently announced a $2.83 billion loss in Q4, their stock rose over 30% in the day. Neither of these measurements, quarterly loss or daily gain, provide any understanding when taken alone, or even when taken together. But when they are taken with the additional context of earlier earnings (loss) projections and the performance of the rest of the market, they begin to make sense.

Whether we’re seeking to understand corporate reputation, or customer experience, or communications impact, it all works the same way. No single measure of any of these will provide understanding; all are understood only with the right context. Hanging an evaluation of success or failure on a single measure of any kind creates a narrow view of the world, and therefore limits what we can accomplish. Context helps us understand the complexity of the environment in which we conduct finance, or communicate, or sell our bills. Allowing ourselves measures that recognize complexity is a critical step to making good decisions. Not becoming overwhelmed by the complexity is the next challenge.