Consistency over stats

In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted, if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” – Tom Seaver

I rediscovered this quote from my August 2009 newsletter, along with my article on consistency, and thought it worth highlighting again.

What is consistency?

Before discussing what consistency means within a business, here is the definition:

consistency: applying to the same principles or guidelines, not contradicting

Mussaman curry has a consistent taste & ingredients

In simpler terms, consistency means made up of the same things. So being consistent in a restaurant means always using the same ingredients for a dish – swapping fish into a beef curry gives a different result and is not consistent.

How would a restaurant survive if some dishes are made with care while others are put together quickly? The lack of consistency would confuse diners – and those getting a poor dish the first time may never return.

For business communications, consistency means making all the words, images, layouts and messages work together with the same look and feel, the same overall style. If everything is consistent, the background message remains the same regardless of the specifics of each piece of writing.

Consistency over stats

It’s easy to get distracted and try something new in the hope of fast results.

For example, some people get caught up in the number of visitors coming to their blog and hear that more posts means more traffic.

So they write two posts a day instead of three a week but time is limited so many posts are written fast with less care. Traffic may rise initially with the more frequent posts, but people won’t come back as often if they can’t rely on the quality of posts.

It may be slower, but three consistently good posts will attract more loyal readers than one good and nine poor posts a week.

Have you ever worried over the numbers at the sake of quality and consistency?

Maybe you have been a customer of a business that got distracted from consistency – how did that affect your relationship with the business?