Ah, the intoxicating alphabet soup of business metrics: ROI, CLV, CPA, CR, NPS, EBITDA. Each an acronym, each a KPI (a YAA: Yet Another Acronym), each ultimately designed to measure the nuances of money flowing in and out of our ventures..
But here’s the kicker: we live in an era shaped by a growing sense of uncertainty. Just peek at the World Uncertainty Index, and you’ll see it climbing year after year for decades. Layer that with the dizzying speed of change as expressed by Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, and it’s clear that relying on just traditional metrics won’t cut it anymore. Enter a new focal point—ROL: Rate of Learning.
Imagine business as a game of dice. Roll a six, and you hit the jackpot. Your odds? One in six. Now, what if you could roll the dice over and over again? Your chance of striking gold increases substantially. But here’s the catch—what if you could remove sides from the dice. Instead of being faced with a six-sided dice, you only have five sides to contempt with. Your chance of success increases dramatically—for this to happen you need to learn from each roll, each endeavor, each fail and win. Incorporate these learnings into your next roll, and watch your odds of success climb.
It all comes down to learning—to be more precise: Your rate of learning. How fast and how much will you learn from round to round. Those of us who manage to increase their rate of learning will be the ones who dominate the game—by sheer might and their unfair advantage of playing with dice tipped in their favor.
So here’s my charge to you: Don’t just hone in on learning; treat it as a quantifiable metric to gauge and elevate. The higher your Rate of Learning, the steeper your trajectory towards long-term, exponential success. So, go ahead and recalibrate those dashboards, make room for ROL, and watch how it revolutionizes your game.