Instead of implementing our change initiatives as long, drawn-out projects, we can run them as a series of iterations. Iterating our way toward a closed performance gap is going to be faster than trying to close that gap with a single big solution.

One person that always seems to have fun around failure is Adam Savage, from Mythbusters. He’s like a big kid, wide-eyed and giggling, as he and his more stoic co-star, Jamie Hyneman, test all kinds of pop-culture myths, like whether you can ride a motorcycle on water, escape a turtled car under water, and put your hand into molten lead and not be injured. Adam routinely says that he doesn’t ca...

Consider the measures your organisation currently uses. How many are calculated annually? Or quarterly? Or monthly? Or weekly? What's the rationale for having chosen that cadence of calculation? One of the bad habits of performance measurement is measuring too infrequently, and this means we miss important signals in our measures.

A perceived lack of data - or lack of data with reasonable quality - is a constraint that stops many people from even trying to develop meaningful performance measures. That sounds logical enough, but it assumes that value of measurement only comes at the end of the process. What if you measured without data?

We shouldn't measure something because it's easy to. Nor should we measure something because we always have. Nor should we measure something because "they" do. We should measure something only because it tells us what we need to know. Can your KPIs pass this test? ...

It's so very hard to set a target for our monthly workplace injuries measure of 5. It feels like we're aiming to injure 5 employees! That's not ethical, is it? It only feels right to set the target as 0. But then we feel like we're setting ourselves up to fail. The tension is awkward. What to do?

Great strategy execution should be about implementing high return-on-investment (ROI) improvement initiatives. But finding that high ROI requires a few mindset shifts about what leverage really means, about the role of data in helping us find leverage, and about where to act to implement leverage.

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

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...

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, warns us about 3 mistakes with metrics that stem from too strong a focus on the data.