231: "A Good Question Will Always Beat a Good Measurement Tool" (Reflections On Logan Yonavjak)
🧠 Erik’s Take
Erik treated this as a short, high-signal recap of his deeper conversation with Logan Yonavjak, but the “takeaway” that kept reappearing was about measurement itself. He realized the real question was not only how to measure leadership readiness, but how easily businesses confuse what they can measure with what they actually need. He also connected Logan’s product challenge to a broader selling problem: you cannot move past the analytics until the customer agrees the underlying concept is measurable and meaningful.
🎯 Top Insights from the Interview
- Businesses lean on proxies like résumés, references, and personality tests, but availability does not guarantee relevance.
- The better measurement question is always tied to the decision you are trying to make, not the tool you can deploy.
- Many leadership-readiness tools are static and snapshot-like, even when the real environment and role demands differ.
- The Readiness Engine’s positioning becomes clearer when it connects leadership capabilities and gaps to business outcomes rather than vague development goals.
🧩 The Personal Layer
Erik admitted that he is not anti-assessment. He has personally benefited from tools like StrengthsFinder and the Core Values Index, so his tension is not with measurement, but with mismatched intent. He also recognized himself in Logan’s investor-pitch reality, where people happily accept analytics for companies but retreat to “experience and pattern recognition” when evaluating the humans inside the system. For Erik, that mismatch is the core friction: selling the ideology first, then the methodology.
🧰 From Insight to Action
- Before choosing any metric, write down the exact decision it must inform, such as readiness for team size, complexity, or strategic scope.
- Audit your inputs: list the proxies you use and ask what question each proxy actually answers, then remove anything that only sounds useful.
- Design assessments to reflect context and change, since fixed snapshots can fail when roles and situations evolve.
- When pitching or scaling, translate leadership development into capability gaps and connect them to outcome expectations the business can track.
🗣️ Notable Quotes
- “Availability isn’t the same thing as relevance.”
- “Before you get excited about the metric, get really clear about the decision you’re trying to make.”
- “Until somebody agrees with the underlying idea, they don’t really care how your solution works.”
- “Leadership development starts to look a lot less like a soft, discretionary expense and a lot more like an operating lever.”
🔗 Links & Resources
