Do you believe that strategy is about projects and initiatives, so you don't need to measure your goals? Do you monitor your actions, because if they're completed, that means your goals are achieved? Do you rely on Staff Turnover Rate to assess how engaged your workforce is? If so, you're wasting your goals!

Sometimes hard-to-measure strategic goals can be fixed in the measurement process (like how Step 2 of PuMP fixes the weasel word problem). But strategy can be hard to measure due to poor logic and poor structure, and this can't be fixed in the measurement process. We have to go back and rework the planning process to make the strategy sensible.

If there was just one thing I could share with you that would have the biggest impact on the ease of finding meaningful performance measures or KPIs, it's this: use words better. It's impossible to get meaningful numbers until you know exactly what you're trying to quantify.

In the Harvard Business Review this month, Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group writes an interesting piece on how our increasingly uncertain world requires us to have a more deliberate strategy. He says our strategy needs a strategy. But with increasing uncertainty, is there still ...