The Score

The first essay in this series argued that the six forms of "psychological debt" are old wounds under new names; this one concerns what happens when the wound is given a number. Guy Champniss's method is straightforward enough: a battery of agreement statements, converted into a score from nought to one hundred, the higher the score the deeper the debt. It sounds like measurement, and in a narrow sense it is. But a score is never merely descriptive. The moment it exists, it acquires the apparatus of institutional life—an owner, a dashboard, a reporting line, a budget for its improvement—and the apparatus, once staffed, acquires an interest of its own. A cured condition is a redundant dashboard. Nobody builds one intending to switch it off after the first board presentation.One matter of provenance belongs here, stated once and plainly. The survey behind the score was conducted for a consultancy of which the author is a director. That is disclosed in the article itself, and I note it…