Imagine there is a universe of measures. It's the all-encompassing collection of anything an organisation happens to measure. Navigating through the universe of measures, to decide how, when, why and whether to use each of them, is a massively overwhelming task.

Measuring performance isn't about ticking boxes to say you've implemented your strategy. It's much more about continually improving the results that are currently most important to your organisation's success. So when you find resistance to performance measurement, often it's because there isn't a continuous improvement philosophy.

Often in measuring performance we ask a question too soon: so, how do we measure that? As soon as you answer that question, you're tumbling down the rabbit-hole toward a world of silliness and subjectivity. The characters you're surrounded by are pretentious goals claiming to be too complex to measure, and confused goals draped in trivial counts and milestones.

Measure Up reader, Paul O, asks: How do I educate my clients (and win new ones) in SMB of the power and ROI behind great KPIs? (more…)

We all want a high-performance culture in our organisations. We want people to be results-oriented, to act with a scientific curiosity, to be relentlessly solution-focused, and to have a continuous-improvement mindset. And we want it now.

Guest author Jerry Stigall, Director of Organizational Development at Denver Regional Council of Governments, has written a guest post on what to say when they say "we're not measuring that because it's outside our control".

There isn't a single and universally applied definition of the word 'goal'. And so many different things pretend to be goals. One messy consequence is that when we try to measure our goals, we can end up with very trivial and useless measures.

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.

Lots of organisations are paralysed part-way through their KPI implementation. They started with all good intentions, but now they have dead and dying measures trapped in the KPI column of their strategic and operational plans, never to see the light of day.

Guest author Terry Fagg, a local government manager, writes a short marketing brief from a fictional consulting firm called Weasel Words Inc. Be warned: this is bad advice!! (more…)