I was in a meeting this week where the meeting leader asked everyone in the room to rank our capability in a particular area [not important what] and every person in the room gave the same answer ... 7.
I was immediately reminded of a rule my little brother [who at the time he told me this was a senior in college] and his friends have about banning the number 7 from rankings. You can guess what their context was.
But think about it ... he's totally on to something. 7 is a cop-out. It's lazy. It's a C. It's mediocre. It's nothing to be proud of, yet we [me included] have no reservations about publicly rating ourselves a 7.
So from here on out I am banning 7 from my rankings. Either I go with 6 - which should be alarming enough to take the right actions to jump the 7 transom and at least get to 8. Or I go with an 8 and look for ways to kick it to a 9 or 10.
Who's with me?
I give this post an 8.
See what I did there?
Posted by: kai | December 17, 2009 at 03:28 PM
If you only rate a 7 then calling it a 6 or an 8 will not not change the fact that you are still a seven.
Posted by: Za Za | December 18, 2009 at 10:31 AM
This is why I no longer recommend rankings to clients when it comes to review features on their "things". One reason is the point you make about a cop-out number, second is that - is anything between 2 and 8 really telling you something meaningful?
People don't take the time to rank something that they are not passionate about (good or bad).
I prefer a combination of "would you recommend this" and "why?"
Posted by: Michael | January 15, 2010 at 11:12 PM