Mark Hocknell, my lead licensed PuMP Partner, wrote this article, "Let's Ban KPIs", which was posted here as well as Mark's own website. To avoid duplicate content, this article now links...

Too often we assume that performance measurement depends on technical systems, like a business intelligence system or dashboard application. But for performance measurement to become entrenched in how our organisations work, it's the non-technical systems that matter most.

If your performance culture isn't very strong, if people just aren't into measuring and improving, you might think your organisation isn't yet ready for developing better KPIs. But the opposite is actually true: your organisation needs better KPIs, right now.

Our definition of accountability for KPIs, or accountability for performance, profoundly affects people's ownership of performance. This new accountability definition creates ownership...

"Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own experience can attest, are frequently based on hope or fear, what others seem to be doing, what senior leaders have done and believe has worked in the past, and their dearly held ideologies - in short, on lots of things other than the facts... If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there w...

The price for informed decision-making is transparency and accountability. And that’s a price that appears too high for many leaders. So they keep their heads in the sand and steer by gut feel. And they pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes with hearsay and anecdote and biased selection of data.

To hold space for high-performance, evidence-based leaders value and use objective evidence to improve organisational performance, as role-models for everyone else.

Evidence-based leadership is not about how to lead. It's about what to give your attention to as you lead, and what you're leading your organisation to. It's not about how to communicate or inspire or direct or engage. It's about how to use all these attributes to lead your organisation to high-performance.

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, suggests that seeking quick-fix KPIs means you're not really ready for proper KPIs.

One of the challenges of making data-based decisions - using our KPIs or performance measures to guide our choices - is that often the data can prove us wrong. As Seth Godin says in his post The Do Over, if we're really going to let data inform our decisions, we have to be brave in admitting...