A high-leverage strategic change initiative promises so much more than an ordinary one. But what exactly defines high-leverage? (more…)

The tick-and-flick approach to reviewing KPIs, one at a time down the scorecard, won't ever reveal the insights about how to truly improve performance.

Buy-in is choice. Sign-off is obligation. Choice has loads more energy, that sustains itself longer, than does obligation. For buy-in to KPIs and performance measurement, people must be involved because they choose to, and not because they’re obliged to.

When we use KPIs, their impact goes beyond our intention of monitoring our goals and reaching targets. Measures influence people's behaviour and the results of other measures. These influences can be unexpected and undesirable, so we must either mitigate them or choose another measure. ...

It would be marvelous if all the data we needed for our KPIs was on tap: automatically collected, collated and captured, and ready to flow into graphs, reports and dashboards. Marvelous, but unlikely. Manual data doesn't have to be a drag.

No KPI can ever give you perfect evidence of your goals. But too often we overestimate how good a KPI needs to be, to be "right". The truth is, KPIs aren't ever "right". You just want to be sure they are "not wrong".

A relevant KPI measures direct evidence of your goal. It tells you the degree to which your goal is being achieved. But when you look closer, many KPIs fail to do this. It's because of three mistakes in how we design those KPIs.

It's often easier to cascade the corporate strategy to customer-facing functions than it is to cascade strategy to support functions. That's because we make a common mistake that's based on a false assumption about how support functions align to strategy.

Many organisations have a KPI mess: too many useless measures, not enough of the right measures, and little idea of exactly how many measures altogether. This mess is an unnecessary cost, and it’s not that hard to clean it up.

One of the reasons why we can't find meaningful performance measures for our goals has to do with whether the goals are about actions or results. Action-oriented goals aren't true goals, since goals should be about making a difference, not just doing stuff. ...