Measure Your Mind: the Mentimeter and How to Use It

CHAPTER I. Science _versus_ Guesswork

SCIENCE VERSUS GUESSWORK

There are two ways, and only two, in which we can find out what a machine is capable of doing. One of these is to try it out, to “put it through its paces” by using it for every sort of work which it is expected to perform and observing whether or not it does what we want it to do. The other way is to measure it (or to take the measurements of it as supplied by its responsible manufacturer) and compare these with the measurements of the essential parts of machines with the performance of which we are already familiar.

Unless it is a brand-new type of machine, designed to do something that has never before been done by machinery, or to do it by a different mechanical method, there is obviously a great saving of time and money in buying a machine from specifications that insure the correct performance of its expected duty over the other plan of first buying the machine and then trying it out in practice to see whether it will do what we want done.

The manufacturer or business man who would purchase machinery of any sort without first making certain that its dimensions, speeds, weight, power-consumption, controls, and the materials used in its construction were such as to adapt it precisely to the work he expected to do with it would speedily bankrupt his business. It takes but a moment’s thought for the reader to prove this to himself.

On the other hand, however, we find business men constantly employing men and women to perform specific duties without applying any tests or measurements, other than the most rudimentary ones, to determine in advance whether the person so employed is fitted for the work he or she is expected to do. And as every employer knows, one of the most costly wastes in almost every business or manufacturing establishment is the expense of constantly “breaking in” new employees to take the places of those who have left or have been dismissed because they were found, after trial, not to be fitted for the duties to be done.

Because the installation of machinery of any kind involves an initial outlay of money, it long ago became apparent to everybody that the “trial and error” method of buying machines or other commodities was wasteful and ruinous. It was not until recent years, however, that the closer study of operating costs disclosed the fact that the expense of “labour turnover,” that is to say the proportion of employees in any given business whose places have to be filled annually, is one of the heaviest avoidable drains on income. This was long overlooked because no capital investment is involved in the initial employment of labour. The cost of training new employees is much larger, it is now learned, in most businesses, than is generally understood, not only in the direct outlay in salary or wages before the new employee has mastered the duties of the new position as well as he or she is able, but in loss through spoiled materials, reduced individual output, and often in the slowing down of an entire chain of manufacturing operations through the inability of the inexperienced worker to maintain the pace of the rest of the links in the chain.

If, then, as so often happens, it is found after experiment that the new employee is not capable of performing the work efficiently, the whole process must be repeated. The employee who has failed leaves, is dismissed, or is transferred to another department, and a new and equally inexperienced worker employed to fill the vacancy, with the whole cost of training to be incurred over again. Even though the new worker may be experienced in the particular class of work to be done, there is an appreciable loss due to the unavoidable frictions and hesitations that occur whenever a worker is being fitted into a new environment.

There is, moreover, no guarantee that even an experienced person in a special sort of work is fitted to do that particular work as well as it can be done or should be done. He or she may have got into that sort of work by accident. That is usually the way in which a boy or girl begins a business or industrial career. He or she may have continued in it merely because the experience gained in the first job enables its possessor to pass the superficial scrutiny of foremen, managers, or others who employ “help” in the first instance. But just as all the experience and training in the world will not make a Paderewski out of a person who was not born with the precise combination of sensory and nervous qualities that the master musician possesses, though almost any one with ten fingers and an ear for harmony can be taught to play the piano after a fashion, so it is true that while in the all-important business of earning a living almost anybody can be trained to do most of the ordinary manufacturing and business operations, after a fashion, it is only those who were born with certain combinations of nerve endings and sensory apparatus who can be trained into first-rate salesmen, or expert tool-makers. And this holds true all the way down the line, to the simplest and most automatic operations necessary in business industry.

Individuals themselves are seldom aware of their own capacities; even less generally of their own limitations. Occasionally, by accident, a man or a woman finds at the right time the opportunity to do precisely the things he or she is best fitted to do. Often the individual’s strong personal instincts or inclinations lead him or her to seek opportunity to do certain kinds of work without any clear understanding why that sort of work appeals while other kinds do not. Few human beings analyze their inclinations closely. Yet it may be and frequently is the case that the work one most strongly desires to undertake is not that in which he or she is best fitted to succeed. The inclination may be counterbalanced by inhibitions of which neither the possessor nor his or her employer becomes aware until repeated failure has demonstrated the lack of adaptability, sometimes after it is, or seems to be, too late to take up another occupation. Then the worker usually drifts into the ranks of “casuals,” constantly moving from job to job, chronically “out of work”; the ready dupe of agitators and the prophets of social unrest and revolution; disheartened, anti-social, and perennially unhappy; the most expensive sort of an employee in any position, no matter how small the wage—yet a human being, and, as such, entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness!

That is an extreme picture. Yet if such tragedies occur (as every reader knows from his own observation and experience they do occur too often) among those who have voluntarily chosen their own lines of work, how much more frequently must they occur among those whose daily occupations have been determined for them, not through any voluntary choice or intelligent guidance but solely through the accident of having been “thrown into” certain jobs when they were young?

That is the way in which the vast majority of individuals have their careers shaped for them. The world of business and industry and of the professions is full of blacksmiths who ought to be carpenters, indifferent lawyers who would have made good dentists, teachers who are failures because they should have been trained as stenographers, good cooks who have been spoiled to make mediocre shop attendants, and so on through the list of possible occupations. Within every business organization, moreover, there are grades and degrees of requirements and responsibilities into which some employees may fit perfectly, others less perfectly and others not at all, though all be drawn from the same group or from those performing the same general class of service. Here, as in the matter of original employment, the general custom of dealing with the human element in industry is the wasteful “hire-and-fire” system, analogous to the purchasing of machinery or equipment without first ascertaining whether it will do the work, and scrapping it when it fails.

We found out long ago that we couldn’t afford to do that sort of thing with machinery. We are just beginning to find out that it is even more expensive to do it with the human element in industry.

It would perhaps be going too far to claim that the whole problem of the “labour turnover” arises from the effort to fit square pegs into round holes, but it is certain that a very large share of all human troubles, industrial unrest, discontent, inefficiency and unhappiness is traceable to the lack of proper adjustment between the man and the job, and this in turn is due in large part to the failure to determine in advance the fitness of the particular individual for the particular task.

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