If you can't mesure it, it doesn't exist

Maybe you've heard of her many many times, maybe you've watched this talk 4-5 times over and over again like I did, but still I want to share this inspirational talk of Brené Brown, who is a research professor (a.k.a researcher of storyteller) studying on vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame.

I am not going to tell about her story or the main topic of this talk but I am just going to focus on one little message she gives.

When Brené Brown was a doctoral student one of her professors told her:

The physicist side of me was easily convinced with this statement because it was obvious to me that scientists were able to exactly measure heat, height, energy, inertia, temperature etc. and prove it through math (at least in the classical physics world :)). 

However, the psychologist/social researcher side of me struggled for a while to give credit to this kind of an assertive idea. In the early stages of my experience on social research, I used the think that social phenomena should be "relative" making it almost impossible to measure correctly. 

Nowadays, I hate this belief of not being able to measure social phenomena because it is so so wrong! As a Human Resources person I find it my most challenging job to make people understand that, by using right tools and research setup, we absolutely can measure the things that we want to, OF COURSE IF THEY REALLY EXIST! 

This should be HR's magic wand to be used to increase the reliability of human resources practices.

Leaving you alone with this amazing Ted talk..


with English subtitles:

with Turkish subtitles: