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Justine G. asks: “How do you identify good KPIs for lofty strategic goals, like ‘improve the health of citizens’?”

You’ve probably heard this argument a lot, too: you’re supposed to keep strategic goals lofty and vague so that they are inspirational and broad enough so that everyone can find their own way to make sense of them and link their work to them.

And maybe like me, you also think it’s hogwash.

Goals are promises to close the gaps between as-is performance and should-be performance that are too wide to tolerate any longer. Strategic goals are the gaps that are the most important to close, such that the organisation takes the largest possible steps toward excelling at what it exists to do.

Good goals are those whose gaps are observable in some way. If you don’t know how you’d recognise the gap shrinking, you don’t have a good goal yet. And that’s the problem with the typical lofty goals you see in strategic plans. No-one understands, or shares the same understanding of, what the gaps look like.

What is the current gap between as-is health of citizens and should-be health? It makes no sense to ask that question, because ‘health’ is too broad. It isn’t just one gap; it encompasses many observable gaps. Disease, injury, fitness, nutrition, depression, substance abuse, stress, and more.

So the question is not how to find KPIs for lofty goals. The question is how to turn lofty goals into measurably meaningful goals. The key to doing that is to explore the possible observable gaps, and then choose the one or two that are absolutely the most important to close. If you don’t do that, and keep those goals lofty, nothing will change in a measurably meaningful way.

TAKE ACTION: Check if you have any lofty, hard-to-measure strategic goals. If you do, take a step back and ask what the goal really means. Try to describe the evidence of it being attained, of the gap between as-is and should-be closing. If you have lots of different types of evidence, then the goal is probably too broad. So break it down into specific and evidence-able gaps, and then work out which gaps are the most important to close. Then just measure those gaps.