For the record, you can measure anything, the relevant, the irrelevant, the crucial and the distractions. Measuring is not a problem, whether you are in the hard side or the soft side of it. Yes, you can measure the soft stuff as well.
But there is a problem. Quite well articulated in a book by Jerry Z Muller entitled The Tyranny of Metrics. And I could not write it up better than the blurb provided. Here it is:
How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens our schools, medical care, businesses, and government
Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we’ve gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing–and shows how we can begin to fix the problem.
And also, from the book itself
There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge—knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.
At the very least, a good reason for reflection