Experiments are what scientists use to stop assumptions from limiting how much they learn about the natural world. And we can use them in business to stop our assumptions from limiting how we can elevate performance, and from wasting the resources we invest to do it.

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.

They will never admit it out loud, or even to themselves, but many leaders are scared of KPIs. And it's for the same reasons most people are scared of KPIs. (more…)

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...

In this case study with Jennifer Pontzer, we discuss a practical and powerful tool that can help you get people interested in KPIs and measuring performance, and build their buy-in and ownership from the start.

We might all measure customer satisfaction or NPS, but neither of these help us monitor specifically what is most important to our customers. Here's how to figure out the most important things to measure for your customers.

There is an ever-increasing supply of KPI libraries and lists available for sale. And they are HUGE. The collections are in the tens of thousands in general and in the hundreds and thousands for specific industries. They are meeting a trending demand in the market, but no one seems to realise the incorrect assumptions this trend is operating on.

Some governments and other organisations not driven by profit use versions of program logic or outcomes models. But just because they use a logic or outcome model, doesn't mean they automatically get great KPIs.

With KPIs, comes transparency. But because most people fear that measures will be used to judge or compare, it's hard to get transparency to work. (more…)

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.